Jewish Quarter

Today, I was really pissed off because the person who was supposed to go sightseeing with me bailed like 2 minutes before we were supposed to meet. If she had told me earlier, I would not have been on the tram I was on going the direction I was going. Oh, well.

So. I decided that since it was a reasonably nice day and not too cold (I am not currently wearing my coat because of the vomit stains), I would go see something cool by myself. I was close to the green line, so I hopped on the metro and got off in the Jewish Quarter, which is something I'd been wanting to revisit since our walking tour six weeks ago.

I found what I was looking for pretty easily. An area with lots of synagogues, a great view of the castle by the way, and I just walked toward this huge wall with lots of tombstones behind it. I figured that must be the Jewish cemetery and museum, based on how it was described to me.

I was able to use my outdated college I.D. to get a discount on the entry fee. I went into the museum, which when you first walk in is two floors of just these walls with all of the Czech Holocause victims' names and birth/death dates written in red and black EVERYWHERE. It's really overwhelming. There's nothing else in this part of the museum. Photography in there is forbidden, which I totally agree with. It would be very disrespectful to make these people's memorial into some cheap tourist landmark. So being in these rooms was just completely humbling and powerful. It almost made me want to cry. Especially since I saw the movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas pretty soon before I came here.

You always hear about the Holocaust as this event that you know really happened and was a really big deal. But learning about it in history classes and such kind of makes the people involved seem like fictional characters. When you see all those names written in tiny writing covering the walls of several rooms, it hits you how big of a deal it really was. And these rooms were just the people from one country. Multiply that by the rest of the people in Europe who were affected. Wow.

And it gets even more powerful. There's another room in the museum where they have children's drawings from WWII--Jewish children, who went to ghettos and concentration camps, some of whom survived, and some of whom didn't. They are child-like drawings of the trains, the camps, the ghettos, their dreams, and imaginations. There are journal entries, photographs, old star of David patches. But it's mostly the drawings that get you. They are labeled by who drew them, when, and whether or not they survived. Some of them have unknown artists.

I was trying to figure out why this experience affected me so much more than when I went to the Holocaust museum in Houston. I think it's because here, it doesn't seem so far away. All of this stuff happened right here, or very close to here.

Anyway, so when you walk out of the museum, you can go into the Jewish cemetery. I'll post pictures of this part. There are all these freaking OLD tombstones just piled on top of each other in this garden area with old Hebrew writing on them. I wish I could've read what they said. They are covered in moss and weathering away. The museum people are trying to restore them as much as possible. I think I read something that said they restore 100 a year or something like that.

These graves (I think, based on what I could tell from the signs and brochures) are mostly from the 16 and 1700s. Some may be older than that. Damn. I can't quite figure out why the Jewish graves/burials were so neglected back then and for so long (the cemetery and all the refurbishing has only been happening since 1975). I guess it's just the anti-Semitic attitudes that were prevalent in Europe for so long. I guess as an American that's hard for me to understand.