Prague, Czech Republic
Prague is cold. I mean really, freezing cold. I was cold all day during our morning at the Old Town Square and at the Terezin Concentration Camp. There was no warmer part of the day – it was just cold all the way through.
We started in the cold and headed to the Old Town Square. We took the trollies there, which seems to be what most people take and is a really efficient way to get around town. There are stops everywhere.
At the Square, we got some warm mead at the Christmas Market. Neither of us cared for it much, but it was a small cup, so we forced it down until it got too cold to warm us and we tossed it. We also visited the Hussite (or as I like to say, hussie) Church – St. Nicolas. The Hussies are an early religious sect centered in Prague. They kind of set the stage for Protestants, but many Hussies are still around in Prague today.
Then we walked across the square to see the Tyn Cathedral. This church was built in the 1300s and was the original center of the Hussite rebellion. But, when the Catholic Habsburgs took control of Prague, they established the church as a Catholic cathedral. We could only go in the bottom floor of both churches, but both were very beautiful and distinct.
We finished with the churches just in time to see the astronomical clock chime 11. When it chimes, the skeleton figure pulls a bell and then men inside the tower go around in a circle and put there faces in the window.
I wasn’t that impressed until Josh reminded me that the clock tower was built in the1300s and that really increases its impressiveness. It is the only clock of its kind still in operation today.
From there we headed to our concentration camp tour. We had to ride a train about an hour and then a bus for about 10 minutes to get to Terezin. This camp was originally built as a fortress in the late 1700s for border defense, but was never used. The main part is surrounded by two motes, making it very hard to access. Eventually, Terezin became a town and people moved in.
However, the nazis saw it as the perfect location for a transit camp. It had two purposes. One was to hold the Jewish people and other captives while the nazis finished constructing the other death camps further east. The second was to serve as a “show camp” for the world to see and address suspicions about what was happening at the other camps.
They presented Terezin as a sort of oasis given to the Jewish people for their management. Even the Red Cross approved the camp after a visit in 1944. Many famous Jewish people were sent to this camp and so a lot of art and music creation took place here. One propaganda video we saw shows lectures being given by famous intellectuals.
The secret was that people were living in cramped conditions, being underfed, and shipped off to the death camps. We saw the crematorium where the people who died from disease or malnutrition were cremated. Normally it takes 1.5 hours to cremate a body. These people were so frail that it took only 30 minutes for most of them.
We also went to a few museums and saw children’s art and the propaganda video, i mentioned earlier. The whole town was a pretty creepy place and people actually live there now – like in the original buildings. Lots of other creepy things happened while we were there, too (like the weird pub we had lunch in, our group getting stranded after missing the last train and having to walk through an underground tunnel to get to the next stop, our tour guide getting yelled at by a museum owner who quickly kicked the group of of the museum and having to stand in front of a psychiatric institution under a full moon). Remind us and we’ll tell you more when we get home.
We were happy to get back to Prague and walk 45 minutes in the cold back to our hotel!
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