Once again here I am dragging myself to do something productive on a sunny but quite chilly Friday afternoon, and what better to update my state-side friends on the Czech life here in Prague. I've had mixed feelings on what to write but I figured I would do a little piece on my trip to
Terezin, a concentration camp north of Prague, and
Lidice, a small town that Hitler leveled after Reinhard Heiydrich was assassinated by Czech paratroopers.
I really was dreading writing on this, but it really is an important part of Czech history during WWII, so here goes.
Just one wall of 3 or 4 with names of the victims who died in Terezin.
We took a day trip to both these places but I'll start with Terezin. While the Nazi's never finished any gas chambers at this particular concentration camp, there were thousands who died due to the horrible living conditions here and if you made it out you were most likely heading straight to Auschwitch concentration camp. The tour took us inside the Guards offices, prison cells, isolation cells, the group shower area, a room of fake sinks for a shaving area, and around the town where they shot a propaganda film of imported Hungarian Jews playing soccer and enjoying the ghetto, all of whom were executed after the film was given to foreign inspectors. All this info you can look up on the links if you want to see the sheer size of numbers of deaths and other horrible living conditions the prisoners were forced into.
The sign reads, Work Makes you Free, a now infamous Nazi quote from the concentration camps.
A really confusing and hard part of this ghetto to understand is the Nazi's obsession with creating the worst conditions for living while putting much effort into showing outsiders that everything was fine with the standard of living. The fake sink/shaving area I mentioned was set up entirely for Swiss inspectors to show them that prisoners were treated fine, despite the fact that they were literally dying in the camp all the time. I won't go into detail on many of the more grotesque images here but you get the general idea. I will say that seeing these places in person allows you to take more time to think about the reality of it, it's one thing to learn about the Holocaust in school but being there gives you a very unsettling feeling.
Part of the monument at Lidice, the museum is to the right side of the building.
Lidice on the other hand was a small town outside of Prague, mostly village life and farming, but it was destroyed after the Nazi leader of the protectorate of Bohemia, Reinhard Heiydrich, was assassinated. These people were not necessarily Jews, but just commoners who were innocent, but the town was literally leveled and nearly all of the inhabitants killed on the spot or sent to Auschwitz to be gassed. There is a memorial and museum built where the town was, and a replica town was reconstructed after the war as a sort of tribute to the families who died there. This particular instance of brutality shows the sheer recklessness and destructive nature of the Nazi regime.
Now I will gladly switch gears a little bit and lighten up the mood by showing a little bit more of the dorm life! I've been waiting to do this post until I settled in a little bit, so here is your sneak peak into the Karlovo Dorms at Vratislavova 10.
Here is the desks/"upstairs" of the dorm, somehow I got seriously the biggest dorm in the whole place, don't ask me how...
And right to the back of that angle is the shower/kitchenette, there is a fridge below the sink and the shower has a heated towel rack, living the life of luxury
Here's my view from two different windows, a castle wall in my back yard, no big deal.
And I couldn't have a post about the dorms be complete without showing Mexico, the sketchiest, smallest bar you may ever have been in. Frequently out of beer, a mediocre selection of liquor, but two great bartenders, and you can always meet some crazy foreigners in here. The potraviny to the right is like a 7-11 or something, usually owned by immigrants from Thailand, this is where I have to buy my pre-paid phone cards that seem to last for a day and a half or so.
So thats the dorms, it's a sweet setup and there are 3 good and very cheap restaurants very close by. I might just have to head down to the Chinese one now, you can't say no to a $3.50 kung-pao chicken dinner, can you?
Also a quick side-note, I hit up a Sparta hockey game the other night which was sick. Sparta and Slavia are the two main Prague teams, although I haven't decided which one that I prefer yet. Sparta was down one goal when we arrived but dominated the rest of the game to win 4-1, it was awesome and tickets were about 7 bucks, can't find that deal at an Avs game I'm sorry to say. Until next time, Na shledanou!
