WITS Virtual Tour: Prague Jewish Quarter
Of all the virtual tours I participated in during the 2021 Women in Travel Summit, touring the Prague Jewish Quarter was the most touching and culturally resonant. Focusing on just a tiny portion of one of Europe’s most scenic waterfront cities, it offered an up-close look at life during the Holocaust, and how the city today remembers this dark chapter of its history.
Our guide for the tour was Nikola Moustafa of Prague City Adventures, who walked us through some basic history: Jews first came to Prague around the tenth century. It didn’t take long for violent riots to break out, and the new residents to be ushered into a ghetto. Another brutal attack—in which 1,500 Jews were murdered—happened in 1389. It took several centuries for the Jews to finally be emancipated, under Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II’s Toleration Edict. The quarter was renamed Josefov in his honor.
By then, residents had begun dispersing, leaving mostly the poorest citizens behind. The quarter continued to decline. Much of it was dismantled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in an effort to overhaul the city. Today it’s become a fashionable place for business, with high-end shops like Bulgari, Prada, and Rolex lining the streets.
Still, several important vestiges of the past remain: a town hall, one of Europe’s oldest surviving Jewish cemeteries, and stumbling stones. From the German Stolperstein, the expression for “stumbling block,” the small concrete blocks were first created by artist Gunter Demnig to identify the last place of residence of victims of the Holocaust. They’re topped with brass plates engraved with victims’ names, and date and place of death, and are embedded among the pavement as a reminder of those lost to the Third Reich.
The Jewish Quarter of Prague also contains six historic synagogues. Of these, I was most taken with the Spanish Synagogue—so called because its architectural flourishes resemble that of the Alhambra in Spain—and the Pinkas Synagogue, the walls of which preserve the name of the massacred during World War II. The first floor of Pinkas Synagogue also has a 19-part exhibition of children’s drawings from the Terezín Ghetto between 1942 and 1944. These, Nikola explained, were preserved by one of the “heroes” of the time period, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis.
(Photo by Libor Sváček, box@fotosvacek.cz, courtesy of Czech Tourism.)
An accomplished artist, Dicker-Brandeis had the extraordinary presence of mind to pack crayons, pencils, and paper as part of the 110 pounds of personal items she was allowed to take with her to Terezín—a combination concentration camp, prison, and propaganda studio. There she became something of a caretaker in a children’s dormitory, where she held art classes in secret.
When Dicker-Brandeis learned that her husband, Pavel Brandeis, was being deported to Auschwitz, she volunteered to be sent, as well. She filled her two suitcases with about 4,500 of the children’s drawings, and gave them to a camp leader, who hid them in an attic. In Auschwitz, Pavel Brandeis was put to work; he would eventually survive the war. Dicker-Brandeis, however, was sent to the gas chamber, along with several dozen of her students. The suitcases containing the art were recovered after the war and given to the Jewish Museum.
The art the children produced was, not surprisingly, often dark and disturbing. Looking at it today gives an incredibly intimate view of the inner workings of the young mind under unspeakable conditions.
(Photo by Libor Sváček, box@fotosvacek.cz, courtesy of Czech Tourism.)
Nikola also related the story of another World War II hero, Sir Nicholas Winton. A British banker born to German-Jewish immigrants, Winton became one of the great World War II humanitarians with his involvement in the Kindertransport. In 1938, he heeded a call for from colleagues in Prague to help aid in resettlement of Jews in the city. Just six weeks before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia began, he left Prague with a plan to bring Jewish children to England, where they would be taken in by local families. Over the course of nine months, he was responsible for the rescue of 669 children.
Just watch this video of a 79-year-old Winton reuniting with dozens of these escapees in 1988, and see if you don’t tear up.
The tour closed with some details about the capture and death of Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague” and one of the master organizers of the Holocaust. Heydrich met his end from sepsis, after being shot in his car seat by two Free Czech agents in 1942. While this may seem like it was a victory, or at least an example of justice served, Gestapo officials, so angered by his execution, retaliated by murdering hundreds of Czechs.
(Photo courtesy of Czech Tourism.)
Not exactly a happy ending to the tour, but for me it solidified the reputation of Prague as a center of culture and thought. Because if we can’t reflect on and try to understand what we, as a human race, have done wrong in the past, how can we ever right our injustices in the future?
For the moment, the Czech Republic is still closed to visitors. But tourism officials hope it will reopen sometime this summer. Keep up-to-date about visiting the country an the Prague Jewish Quarter on the Visit Czech Republic website.
