Artful Prague

The old man at the tram stop overheard us puzzling over our map and remarked in English, "Ah, you are practically natives!" He was the only Praguer to initiate a conversation with us. He asked where we were from, and when Rachel said New York, he told us that at one time he had lived in Hell's Kitchen. He said his name was Josef Hruska, then he added, unexpectedly, "Not only am I 81, I am also Jewish!" He said that when the Communists took over, he fled for Israel, then he went to Colombia and later the United States, and now he was back happily living in Prague. Our tram came, and Josef Hruska, a living miracle—a Czech Jew who escaped being murdered as a boy—said goodbye.

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Since I was on a cultural trip to Prague, an unanswerable question loomed over my visit: What happens to your culture when your Jews are killed? The numbers are overwhelming. In Prague: A Cultural and Literary History, Richard Burton writes that in 1939 there were 118,310 Jews in Czechoslovakia (the Czech portion of which was renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by the Germans), many of them refugees fleeing Germany and Austria. Of those, 78,154 were murdered. When the Communists took over after the war, only about 5,000 Jews remained in Prague, and many of them fled, like Hruska, when the purges—targeting Jews—began.

Vanished Jews are big business these days. Prague's old Jewish Quarter, called Josefov, is perpetually crammed with tourists. Native son Franz Kafka, whose work was banned during much of the Communist period, is now iconic. His name and face are everywhere, and a new Kafka-themed museum recently opened near the Charles Bridge. Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40 and is buried in Prague next to his parents. His three younger sisters—Gabriele, Valerie, and Ottilie—were exterminated. It is believed Ottilie passed through the Czech concentration camp Terezin (also known by its German name, Theresienstadt), a former fortress about 40 miles outside Prague, and finally perished at Auschwitz.

Jews first came to Prague at the end of the 10^th century. For much of their time there, they were confined to a small section of the city, were excluded from most professions, and had to wear a special badge to identify themselves (a practice later revived by the Nazis). Anti-Jewish riots and pogroms broke out from time to time, but for the most part, it was a relatively peaceful existence. So much so that Burton writes that in the Jewish diaspora, it was referred to as "City and Mother of Israel."

At the site of a new shopping, office, and residential development in Prague, archaeologists have been allowed to assess the buried artifacts before construction begins. Emerging from deep in the earth are pieces of medieval Jewish tombstones that had been taken centuries ago from the Jewish cemetery to use as building materials. The Jewish history of Prague, even in the few days I'm there, has a similar way of unexpectedly disinterring itself.

One day, Francesco, Rachel, and I stopped for lunch in a nontouristy part of town at a nondescript basement restaurant called the Piano Bar. Next to our table, attached to the wall, partially hidden by a heating pipe, was a piece of writing under Plexiglas, two paragraphs in Czech, German, English, and—this is what caught my eye—Hebrew. It was titled "Terezin Artists," and it concisely told the story of the imprisonment and death of some of the country's most celebrated musicians, composers, singers, and other artists at the camp. I asked a table of English-speaking Czech patrons if they knew why the memorial was there. They had never noticed it, but they asked the non-English-speaking staff. A waitress shrugged and said that it was left behind by the last owner; he sold the place years ago, and nobody knew more than that.

The buildings of Prague may have come through World War II essentially unscathed, but since it was one of the first countries occupied by Germany, it's remarkable that its synagogues are still standing. It turns out that they survived for a most malign reason. As Hitler's army marched across Europe, he ordered the continent's Judaica to be looted and sent to Prague. There, he was going to establish a "Museum to an Extinct Race."

But what is called the Old-New Synagogue, completed around 1270, is still used by the remaining Jewish community. On the Gothic ceiling, a fifth rib was added to each arch so that the congregants didn't look up to contemplate a pattern resembling a cross. Outside is the Old Jewish Cemetery. Because the Jews were confined to a small area, they could not expand their cemetery outward to accommodate the dead. Instead, they went up. There are 12 layers here, and 12,000 visible headstones, the oldest dating from the 15^th century. The stones lean hither and yon, like teeth in a long-neglected mouth. These are the lucky Jews, I think. These are the Jews who got graves.

The most famous marker belongs to the chief rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who died in 1609. A scholar and a mystic, Loew fought anti-Semitism and harsh government decrees. He is most famous today for his anachronistic association, starting in the 18^th century, with the legend of the golem.

According to the tale, Rabbi Loew fashioned a creature out of the earth and gave it the breath of life. It was a simple being, a servant of its maker, created to protect the Jews of Prague. In one telling, it becomes violent, and the emperor begs the rabbi to destroy it. The rabbi gets the emperor to promise he will protect the Jews and then places the slumbering golem in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, ready to return to life in case he's needed again. During the 20^th century, the golem must have slept the sleep of the dead.

Next door is the Pinkas Synagogue, built in 1535, which is now the city's Holocaust museum. I usually avoid Holocaust museums. Not because I want to pretend it didn't happen, but because confronting both the scale and the specificity is too much to bear. I forced myself into this one, though. It is simple and effective: The walls are covered with the names of 77,297 dead, handwritten in block script. I stagger at what almost 80,000 names looks like, floor to ceiling, room after room.

Upstairs is a small art exhibit: the works of the children of Terezin. Terezin was an unusual concentration camp, a Potemkin village in which the inmates were actively encouraged to produce artwork of all kinds. The children were given drawing instruction; famous Czech musicians composed and performed. This helped to convince officials from the Red Cross that the Jewish citizens who had been rounded up from their homes and imprisoned were being held in decent circumstances. By the end of the war, almost everyone at Terezin, including most of the 15,000 children, had been murdered.

In this gallery, the children's drawings are grouped by subject—things like memories of home, dreams of returning, life before deportation, transport. What is there to say? That Ruth Weissova was a promising young artist who was gassed to death just after her 14^th birthday? I came to Prague to make art and to look at art. It all seems useless when you're looking at the art of obliteration.

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