PRAGUE – Czech Republic (Thurs 30 July)

We didn’t do much today. We had a late start today due to domestic duties, and then it was Justine’s turn to find a hairdresser. As it turns out, after spending the last few weeks trying to find a hairdresser, they are everywhere here, so it didn’t take long to find one to her liking (that could also speak English). We spent most of the day mooching around town, getting into the British Embassy (that’s another story), and then back to the Jewish Quarter. We were going to spend most of the day at the castle, but we ran out of time.

Our first stop was the Pinkas Synagogue. What a sobering experience. Imagine being in a church where all the walls and available space are covered with names of people that have been murdered. Each name is followed by a date of birth and a date of death (or as close as can be ascertained). There are 80,000 names written on the walls of the synagogue, representing the 80,000 Jews from Prague and surrounds, that died. When randomly reading through the dates you see 70 year olds, 40 year olds, and then children that are 7 and 9 years old. Upstairs there is an exhibition of the drawings done by the children whilst in the Ghettos and Concentration camps. Among the Terezin (the nearby concentration camp) prisoners, there were over 10,000 children under the age of 15. Of those only 242 survived. These were some of their drawings.

From the synagogue you go straight into the Old Jewish Cemetery. It was established in the first half of the 25th Century and operated until 1787. It currently contains 12,000 tombstones, but the remains of about 100,000 people. Because they were not permitted to expand the cemetery, they kept burying on top of previous bodies. In some places it is estimated that they are 12 deep. The space between the headstones is less than minimal. Jammed in together, the headstones are in many places almost sitting on top of each other, all leaning at different angles. A very strange sight indeed.