City of a Hundred Spires

For Hannah's graduation present we took her on a Jones trip to Prague, Czech Republic; which is also known as the Paris of Eastern Europe or the City of a Hundred Spires.   I didn't do much research going in and didn't know what to expect.  I mean, it used to be behind the Iron Curtain, right?

So here are some of my impressions.
*Prague has a lot of graffiti, but other than that it was a very clean city.  We hardly ever saw trash on the street.
*The city center has a lot of older buildings - many built in the early 1900s.  Since Prague was lucky enough to escape bombing during WWII those buildings are still standing.  There are older buildings - we saw some built as far back as 900AD.  And the city's "castle" complex was built over the course of several hundred years from 1300AD (including the 700 years old Charles Bridge) and on.  So there wasn't necessarily the full on thousand year old buildings that I was expecting, but there were definitely OLD buildings.
*The city center with all those buildings from the turn of the century was INCREDIBLE.  I could have looked at the architecture forever.  They knew how to build beautiful buildings back then.  I took petty of pictures of city streets because I just loved it.  L.O.V.E.D  I.T.

Typical street and buildings

Called the Powder Tower because that's where the gun powder was stored.  Part of the original city wall

These cars were everywhere and fit the buildings perfectly

Beef goulash with dumplings - traditional meal

However!  Even with 1.3 million inhabitants, the parts of Prague worth visiting take up a fairly small geographical area and within two days we had covered just about all of it on foot.  Lovely.  But how often do you want to walk the same streets over and over (sitting and looking forever is totally different than walking past the same cheesy souvenir shops forever).  So I was really glad that we had some out of town excursions planned.  Also - the city center is full of tourists.  Locals can't afford to live there.  So that was interesting.  Most people spoke at least a little English, thus conversing was simple.  Food was fairly inexpensive and plentiful.  We could feed the three of us for $30 including a tip and have more food than we could eat.  Maybe that seems expensive, but we were eating at nice sit-down restaurants, not fast food, eating multi-course meals.  Water was more expensive than beer - Czechs drink more beer per capita than Germany.  In case you wondered.  They have a darling car company called Skoda that we were told means, "what a pity" - a funny name for a car company!  Czech is a republic - they had their first election three years ago.  The people are reserved but kind and very proud of their history - filled with wars as it is.  They have been bounced around being controlled by so many different groups/countries!

600 year old astronomical clock - still works!

Charles Bridge at night

What we did and saw:

We did a tour of several Jewish synagogues.  There is a Spanish synagogue that reminded me of so many that we saw in Spain.  And a 900 year old Synagogue that somehow survived Nazi occupation. One of the synagogues had names of all the local Jews (Prague and surrounding communities) that were killed in WWII in concentration camps.  It was eye-opening to see all those names listed and think of the heartbreak that accompanied each one of those deaths.

Spanish Synagogue

We toured the Prague castle and the gorgeous cathedral set in the center of the castle complex.  There was a monastery that we didn't get to see.  Then we walked down the Golden Street which is pretty much what you would imagine a cleaner version of a middle ages street to look like.  The buildings were squished together, incredibly tiny and misshapen and so adorable.  But honestly I can't imagine living in them.  Several housed tiny stores that were smaller than my bathroom.  Others were fixed up to show how people lived during the middle ages.  But as our tour guide pointed out, they fixed them up for one person, but more often there were 5-8 people living in one little space the size of my bathroom.  Wow.

We visited the Konopiste Castle, which was the home of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand who's assassination (with his wife Sophia) started WWI.  He killed over 300,000 animals - a big hunter.  Josh and the other FAs were doing the math and figured that he had to have killed over 20 a day, taking Sundays off.  He traveled to the far reaches of the globe as a big game hunter too, so tiger and elephant trophies as well as local animals filled the walls.  We toured rooms and hallways filled with weapon collections (many of which he inherited), including a full suit of armor for both rider and horse.  Some really lovely stuff there.  We weren't allowed to take pictures indoors, though! I snuck one of the armor but it's not so great.  I googled it - click on images.  It's pretty beautiful.
konopiste castle

Peacock at the castle.

The highlight of our trip was probably our excursion to visit the memorial statue of Nicholas Winton.  If you haven't read the story that Josh shared on Facebook, you can find it here:  https://fee.org/resources/the-story-of-nicholas-winton/

Or you can watch the full documentary about him here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYwH2KFMq94

I think we were all a little teary-eyed there thinking of what amazing things that humble man did.

On our final day we visited Terezin, which was a Jewish Ghetto/work prison about 20 miles north of Prague.  It felt so meaningful to be there, but it was the most emotionally challenging day.  We first toured the prison.  We walked into a room the size of my girls' bedroom and were told that 70 Jewish men lived there with no bucket for a toilet, no food - just held there in standing room only until they perished - which took about two weeks.  There was a delousing room where prisoners had five minutes to get from their barracks to the room, throw their clothes in the washer, walk into the shower room and get hosed off, then back to the washer to retrieve their wet clothes, dress, and be back in their barracks.  Five minutes.  And they did this even if it was below freezing outside.   The only difference between Terezin and the concentration camps that we have heard of is that Terezin didn't have a gas chamber.  People weren't sent there to be killed, per se, but they were treated in such a way that there was little hope of survival.  Food was minimal, disease rampant, and they never had appropriate clothing.

Then we visited the ghetto.  This was originally a town of about 6500.  The Nazis kicked out the original inhabitants and used it as a storage facility, basically, to house Jews who were on their way to the concentrations camps.  They had schools and things, but they were short on food, and still lived in very cramped quarters.  I think they were allowed schools and some small normalities as a form of crowd control.  Of the thousands of children who passed through the ghetto, only about 200 survived the war.
I've included a brief history from Wikipedia at the end of the blog post.  Photos can be found here:  terezin
Walking through it make it so much more real than any movie I've watched or book I've read.  I still get teary when I think about it.  It was a life-changing experience.

Between Nicholas Winton and some stories that were shared at Terezin,  I was thinking about the cruel evilness that has existed at times on earth, but how in spite of that, there are always people who rise above and go out of their way to bring goodness and light to the world.   I'm so grateful for their courage.




Other Prague pictures:

Best juices ever.  Wish we could get them in the states.

Fred and Ginger building - can you tell they are dancing?  The Fred building is built shorter than the Ginger building on purpose - as Fred Astaire was shorter than Ginger Rogers.  His arm is holding her, and he has a "hat" on his head.  ;-)
love it

Reminded us of a treat we ate in Spain

"choo-choo train" as it was called, from the parking lot to Konopiste castle.  

Across the river from our hotel, looking across to the city center.

Cemetery at Terezin

From the roof of our hotel

Dinner the final night.  Sure loved spending time with my girl.

Notes on Terezin:

By 1940 Germany assigned the Gestapo to adapt Terezín, better known by the German name Theresienstadt, as a ghetto and concentration camp. Considerable work was done in the next two years to adapt the complex for the dense overcrowding that inmates would be subjected to. It held primarily Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as tens of thousands of Jews deported chiefly from Germany and Austria, as well as hundreds from the Netherlands and Denmark. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there, including 15,000 children.^[3]

Although it was not an extermination camp, about 33,000 died in the ghetto. This was mostly due to the appalling conditions arising out of extreme population density, malnutrition and disease. About 88,000 inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.^[3][4] As late as the end of 1944, the Germans were deporting Jews to the death camps. At the end of the war, there were 17,247 survivors of Theresienstadt (including some who had survived the death camps).^[3]

Part of the fortification (Small Fortress) served as the largest Gestapo prison in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It was on the other side of the river from the ghetto and operated separately. Around 90,000 people went through it, and 2,600 died there.^[3]

The complex was taken over for operation by the International Red Cross on 2 May 1945, with the Commandant and SS forces fleeing within the next two days. Some were later captured. The camp and prison were liberated on 9 May 1945 by the Soviet Army.^[3]