Prague

Last weekend Alana and I went to Prague. I was especially excited to go for two reasons 1) everyone who has been to Prague has glowing reviews of it and 2) it is where my great-grandparents on my dad's side of the family are from.

So kind of like going back to my roots, if you will. Although, I really was skeptical about thinking of Prague as "where I am from". If there is one thing that living here for a semester has done, it has made me feel more American that I ever did at home. As far as I am concerned my family is my mom, my dad, my sister, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I find it all but impossible to feel connected to people I have never met and identify with a country that I have never been to. Once every two years my family on my dad's side gets together for three days of food, family, and more food. One of these days we always have traditional Bohemian food - and that's all I knew about Bohemian culture. (in case you were confused, Prague used to be a part of Bohemia before it eventually came to be in the Czech Republic. If you want to know exactly how that came about you can click here)

Since there are no direct flight from Santiago to, well, hardly anywhere, we had to fly to Madrid to get a connection to Prague. After our 8 hour forced lay-over in Madrid when we first arrived in Spain I've developed a learned association Madrid-Barajas = frustration. This trip did nothing to help my already volatile opinion. We were directed back and forth between terminals by some really ignorant information desk people (my favorite quotes were "that airline does not exists" and "you aren't on this flight"). I had kind of a proud Spanish moment, however, when I was able to argue with a really mean guy who accused Alana and I of cutting in line once we finally figured out where we should be to get our tickets. We got our passports stamped, which was kind of neat. When we got into Prague we had to change money to korunas. It was fun to get different money, and the exchange rate was really in our favor (1 euro = 26 korunas). Some places let you pay in euros, but the most part you had to use the korunas. Things were cheaper, but it was really weird to see things cost 500. We made it to our hostel, Hostel Alia, which was in the "quiet part" of Prague. We quickly learned that "quiet" = "far away from most things".It was very simple, but our budget didn't allow us the luxury of being choosy. In a way, it looked very Eastern European to me. This is the breakfast room - Our room was pretty much the attic. We also had "satellite" TV, which consisted of 4 channels all in Czech.Being far away from the center of the city wasn't a problem at all. Prague has outstanding public transportation - it has a trolley, Metro, and buses. It is really easy to get anywhere you want to be. We also quickly learned you can get anywhere for free because while there are places to get your ticket stamped, no one checks them and no one uses them.

The trolley -Prague was also easy to navigate because it divided up the city into sections and it was easy to tell where you were (for example, this is Prague 4)Our first trolley ride was to the Noodle Bar, a Thai restaurant that the New York Times reviewed and my cousin Jacky emailed me about. It was such a chic, trendy restaurant. The atmosphere was a lot of fun, and the food was INCREDIBLE.I had pad Thai which I have dearly missed. There isn't a variety of restaurants in Spain (except for in the big cities like Madrid or Barcelona) because Spaniards don't really like spicy or international food. So it was really nice to have a break from the pescado and patatas!
The next morning we had a Czech breakfast (which was really like any other European breakfast - cheese, meat, bread with jam, and coffee). We made reservations before we came to Prague to see Terezín , which is a concentration camp just outside of Prague.

Terezín
I wanted to go to a concentration camp because I feel that it is something that everyone should do if they have the option. The Holocaust was such a horrible, unimaginable thing that served no purpose and solved no problem. It is a cold, hard reality that people are capable of such a thing on such a grand scale. I believe that one of the safeguards to prevent another Holocaust is education - showing people what really happened, explaining how it happened so we can be aware and make sure it never happens again.

A brief history of Terezín taken from the pamphlet -
The small fortress was built at the end of the 18th century. It was used, almost from its very beginnings, as a prison. Following the occupation of the Czech lands in 1939, with the existing prisons gradually filling up as a result of Nazi terror, the Prague Gestapo Police Prison was set up in the Small Fortress in 1940. The first inmates arrived on June 14, 1940. By the end of the war, 32,000 prisoners of whom 5,000 were women passed through the Small Fortress. Most of the prisoners were people arrested for different signs of resistance to the Nazi regime. The prison population included primarily people from a broad spectrum of the Czech resistance movement. For most of the inmates the Small Fortress was just a stop-over, as they were later sent on to Nazi courts, other prisons, penitentiaries and concentration camps, where 5,000 of them perished. Some 2,600 prisoners died in Terezín due to harsh living conditions, diseases and torture by wardens and guards. At the end of the war, a typhoid epidemic broke out in the overcrowded prison, the Nazi command taking no countermeasures whatsoever. Between 1945-1948 the Small Fortress served as an internment camp for Germans before their resettlement from Czechoslovakia.

The first thing we saw was the graveyard.I have seen Arlington Cemetery before, and this reminded me of it, just for the number of graves there were.Most of the graves did not have names, just numbers. This graveyard was laid out in 1945 after the camp had been liberated. They dug up the mass graves that the Nazis had made and gave the deceased the proper burial that they deserved. It was hard to see the number of graves there were. Each one of them was someone - someone who had a family, friends, hobbies, someone who laughed at stupid jokes, someone who had dreams for the future, someone who until the day the Nazis took them away had a normal life. It was even harder to see just numbers. Each grave was someone, and since they were murdered just like cattle by the Nazis they were denied the chance to have history remember their exact name.The Small Fortress really was anything but small.
The first part that we saw was the Administrative Yard which is where all of the new prisoners surrendered all of their documents, were mail coming to and from the prisoners was censored, where the prison commander's office was, and where uniforms were administered.

At the end of the yard was this sign which is typical of all Nazi camps. It means "Work Will Make You Free". This was one of the many methods of deception that the Nazis used to motivate the prisoners. The idea was to give the prisoners hope that there was a way out - that if they worked hard enough they could earn their freedom. Inside of the gate was the First Yard - which was divided into Blocks A and B. It housed 17 mass cells and 20 solitary cells. Up to 1,500 prisoners lived in this yard. As many as 60 to 9o prisoners were put into a room like this. There was one toilet, maybe two sinks, and two small barred windows.This is a solitary room. This was for prisoners on death row, or inmates that were being punished. They would sometimes lock prisoners in here for three days without food or water.Since there were no windows, this is how dark the hallways were. Some of the rooms didn't have windows either.This was a the sickroom. Painfully inadequate for thousands of people. When the Nazis found out that the appointed doctor was actually helping the prisoners, he was shot and replaced with someone else who "cared" for the inmates.These are the showers. They weren't used as a gas chambers, they were used for delousing. Since the water wasn't heated, there were often things (organisms, bacteria, etc) in the water so the prisoners didn't really get clean at all.This is the "so-called model barbershop". It was created in 1944 and was meant to show the level of hygiene maintained in the prison. This was purely for show, in 1944 the Red Cross came to inspect the town (because Terezín itself was a Jewish Ghetto) and the Nazis made this room to show in case they came to inspect the prison as well. They never came to the prison and the room was never used. When they liberated the camp several survivors had no idea the room even existed. Alana thought this was one of the hardest things to see and I completely agree. To think that they would do something so extreme to hide what they were really doing is sick.This is leading to the connecting corridor.There were not many people who were able to escape - the Small Fortress being in the middle of a wide-open field and all - but three men escaped through here - This is the execution ground. Execution of prisoners began in 1943. A total of 250 to 300 prisoners were shot dead without a court sentence. The biggest execution took place on May 2, 1945. As many as 52 people, mostly members of the Czech resistance groups were killed. The gallows were used just once for the hangings of the 3 prisoners.Mass graves out of which 601 bodies were exhumed in the summer of 1945. The remains were put in the cemetary in front of the Small Fortress.This almost made me lose it. In the field of the mass graves were hundreds of these little white flowers - the exact same ones that Kate, Theresa, and I were making necklaces out of a week ago in the park. It was hard because I kept thinking about those people who died there - they probably played in a park with their friends as well. There was a carefree time in their lives, before they were taken from their familes and homes for some empty reason motivated by pure hatred. I just couldn't believe that it happened. I couldn't deny its existance, there was no way I could escape it - I was standing right there. In that moment I was very ashamed to be a human.We walked through the aptly titled "Death Gate" where the prisoners were escorted to the execution ground to the part where the officers lived. There was a lovely park completely walled off for the officers and their families.These are the apartments where the officers and their families lived. I know it sounds odd that they made working at the concentration camp a family affair but as I learned in my History of WWII class, they did this to balance out the officers. The Nazis quickly learned that they officers needed some sort of disconnect to keep them from going crazy and keep them able to do their work. How anyone could torture and kill innocent people by day and come home to play with their children at night is beyond me. This is the swimming pool that was built in 1942 for fire-fighting purposes but also for the recreational use of the families and officers. It was constructed by students from Roudnice and Jewish inmates, who were beaten and tortured to death during the work. There was also a cinema where the officers and guards watched movies.This was a memorial to the prisoners.We then walked to the Fourth Yard. It was constructed in 1943, and the first prisoners arrived in 1944. At the end of Nazi rule, more than 3,000 inmates were languishing and dying in this yard.Each of the mass cell accommodated 400 to 600 inmates. At the end of the war, prisoners classified XYZ, destined to be killed were kept here. Our guide told us that these were the worst cells to be in because of these skylights. There was little to no ventilation in these rooms, so in the hot Czechosolvaican summers it got so humid that the condensation would drip from the celiling. It was especially unbearable when the Nazis would lock everyone inside for days on end as a punishment.More mass cells, these ones didn't have any windows at all. When the Red Army liberated the camp, these cells were used to hold German prisoners -of-war before they were shipped off to their trials.This was the hallway of solitary rooms. Just like in the First Yard, people were held here before executions or for punishment.This was a memorial to all of the nacionalities who died at Terezín.This was a statue in front of the muesum which detalied life in the camp.We drove into the town and saw the Jewish museum. Alana and I watched a short film on the Ghetto, and kind of walked around the muesum. It was almost too much to take in, so we didn't stay long. On the way home I felt so shell-shocked that all I could do was listen to my iPod and stare out the window. I came away with a feeling of deep embarassment and horror. I was embarassed that I was a part of a race of living things that has the capacity to do such a thing. I was horrified at the sheer maginitude of it - even though I have taken a class and know what happened it was quite a different thing to see it, to stand where those people stood, to see what those people saw. The scariest thing is that it happened gradually, little by little, until it was something unstopable. The other thing that shook me was that it wasn't really that long ago. It was in my grandparent's lifetime. We really aren't so far removed from it. I hope that we can be brave enough to take the time to understand what really happened so we can be sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

Back to Prague
So we drove back into the city and Alana and I had a quiet lunch. We were still kind of emotional from the day, so we treated our selves to a nice lunch outside in the sunshine. Inside I noticed this piano with my great-grandparent's last name on it! Ok, so maybe this isn't how they spell it and I have no idea how to pronouce it with the thing over the A, but still!After lunch we cruised this strip and went shopping. Jacky and recommended this location for good deals, and we were very happy to find many good buys.There also was a Statue of Saint Wenceslas on his horse. This is actually the largest "man on horse" statue in Europe. Quite a feat, because as I have seen, man on horse is an extremely popular theme among statues.Walking around we saw this store, which made me smile. I guess they really aren't quite sure...That night for dinner Alana and I found a sushi restraunt and thouroughly enjoyed it. Sushi has been another thing I've REALLY missed about home. Actually, just variety in food in general. After dinner we went back to the hostel and went to bed, we were really too emotionally drained to do anything else.

The next morning we decided to do touristy things about Prague. We took the trolley to the Charles Bridge - There was a really good view of the city from the river.Walking to the Old Square, we were held captive in a street of nothing but tourist shops. I saw quite a few Ronhadino jerseys, further proving what an international star this guy is, and now much of an idiot I was for not knowing who he is until Clark started talking about him around World Cup time :)
The Old Square!Old Square is famous in part for this clock, the Astrological Clock. It is a lot shorter than I expected. It is supposed to do some sort of trick at the hour, or half hour, but it didn't do it when we were there and we didn't feel like waiting for it. But it was cool to look at nonetheless!Walking around, I was suprised at how colorful Prague was. Also, there were a lot of clocks.We had lunch at an Italian restraunt. There was this little dog under one of the tables which didn't really phase us. Pretty much everywhere in Prague you can bring your pet - restraunts, stores, whatever you feel like.Since the weather was warm, we were victim to witness the very popular "man-pris" which are capris for men. I am not a fan.We made our way back to the Charles Bridge. This statue greets you as you start your voyage across the river - I really have no idea why this bridge is famous. It was really cool because it had statues like these every few feet - Like everywhere else we have been, it was really crowded - The river was very picturesque - It was really windy though!More Prague on the other side of the bridge - We saw this sign and I wanted a picture because it said "Bohemian" and later I noticed that it also said "tapas". I thought it was neat. (I am probably the only one, but yo soy que yo soy)We did some shopping, then went back to the hostel for a rest. Walking home we decided to chronicle the hardest part about Prague - the language. We've been quite a few places in Europe - Portugal, Italy, France - and even though we haven't spoken the language we could pretty much figure it out. This was not the case with Czech. It was impossible to decypher anything - you couldn't even tell what was a noun, what was a verb, etc. Thank God for pictures, or else we would have no idea what any of the signs ment. Everyone spoke English, so it wasn't hard to ask questions or talk to people.This was really the only word we picked up. I think it is funny because it is only one letter away from vodka. I'll refrain from making any comments about Eastern European sterotypes.That night for dinner we went back for some more sushi :) Later we had a few drinks at the "largest Irish Pub in Prague" and walked around a little before we caught the last trolley home. Prague was really pretty at night.All in all, I would have to say that Prague was one of my favorite places that we've been. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is planning on visiting Europe.