Via Prague: The Saddest Lesson

About an hour outside Prague, near the confluence of the Elba and Egre rivers, is the town of Terezin. It's a lovely town, with the autumn leaves falling in red and gold in the town square. A melancholy flavor fills the streets, particularly on Sunday afternoon, when the streets are quiet.
It's hard to believe, as you walk the streets, that such a place could have been witness to some of the most horrendous crimes of the Twentieth Century. Here, following the occupation of Czech lands in 1939, the Prague Gestapo Police set up a prison in a small fortress on the outskirts of the town. The fortress would become what was known as a transfer station, one of many in Europe, that were part of Hitler's Final Solution to the Jewish problem.
By the time the war ended in 1945, some 88,000 people passed through its gates -- many bound for the death camps at Auschwitz and Riga. In the end, a mere 3,000 survived the war. Of those who weren't transferred, many died because of disease and suffering under extremely harsh living conditions.
My student Marian and his girlfriend Andrea invited me along with some of their friends, Radek and Bara, to tour the fortress. I'd seen footage of such horrors on the History Channel, as I'm sure most readers have, but nothing prepared me for what what we'd experience that afternoon.
The fortress itself, built in the 18th Century, is spread out over rolling countryside, grass growing from the flat roofs. After paying at the gate, we passed the guardhouse, which served for censoring inmates' mail as well as for interrogations. Then a clothing warehouse, where new arrivals had to hand over their civilian clothing and dress in uniforms of armies defeated by the Nazis. And then on into the First Yard, divided into two blocks, with mass and solitary cells. Up to 1,500 inmates lived in this yard at any given time.
I'd heard from others who've been to concentration camps all the cliches about chills running down the spine. Walking into one of the mass cells, where the flat wood beds, a long single board that ran the length of the wall, five stories high, you do feel your eyes begin to mist. A single sink, rotted out now with rust, sits by the wall. 'Imagine,' says Marian. 'Up to 100 people were in this room and they had one sink.'
According to our brochures, the cells were often so crowded that each prisoner had less than one square meter of individual space -- which led not only to nervous tension but also helped spread disease. When it got too bad, to relieve overcrowding inmates were shipped off to the death camps.
We passed a delousing station and a 'model' barbershop, a mock room that was designed to show in propaganda films the high quality of hygiene maintained at the prison.
Later we toured blocks of individual cells. I got in one and, to my surprise, Marian shut the door. There was a single wooden bed in a tiny box. I could hardly stand up straight.
'How does it feel?' Marian asked.
'Let me out,' I said.
After passing through a winding corridor we arrived outside. It was a quiet, grassy hillside. A single plaque on the ground told us that it was here that once stood a mass grave. A total of 601 bodies were exhumed in the summer of 1945, and later reburied in the National Cemetery.
But amid these horrors, there were unexpected treasures. In one of the former mass cells, today is a gallery featuring the drawings of a young Czech student who was imprisoned at Terezin during the war. She survived and later became a professional artist. Her drawings, many of them simple pencil drawings, offer wistful, sometimes sad, sometimes insightful, portraits of everyday life in the prison. Evenings when the prisoners sat and talked, or the sick crowded around the cell's single, inadequate heater. One particular drawing struck me: A single person, their back to the viewer, is sitting on the ground by a tree. The inscription, in Czech, reads 'We just want to go home.'
Other such treasures awaited us in the museum, and later, when we toured the Ghetto museum down the street. Scores of artists, musicians and scientists were among those imprisoned at Terezin. While life was harsh and inhumane, many found time and resources to continue to create. Scores for operas ('Terezin Waltz,' I remember one of them being), hand-made cloth dolls, poems, letters, drawings, survive. They provide testament to the courage of people doomed and yet possessed with an indomitable life energy. Thousands of children also were imprisoned, many sent to death camps. And yet teachers held 'secret lessons' for the children, in hopes of providing them with some education should they survive the war (a few did). Some of the children's drawings survive, and are on display.
Marian and Andrea, as well as Radek and Bara, are all university students. They're starting back to school on Monday. Marian's a third-year law student, Andrea and Bara are area studies majors, and Radek is a 'first -year, second-time,' as he says with a smile, IT student. These events happened long before any of us were born, and all of them are too young to remember the Communist era that followed the end of the Second World War, but they all seemed affected by what they saw, just as I was.
In the end, it's a little overwhelming, the sheer volumes of names, of places, of dates and atrocities. You're both exhausted and melancholy, and the sunlight outside seems unnaturally bright, the streets so calm that Marian was moved to remark it felt like a ghost town.
'Next time we have to do something happier,' he says. The others are quiet, reflective. To break the strain, we make little jokes.
Throughout the day, something nagged at me, what I couldn't say. It was a peculiar form of loneliness, an elusive worry, a haunting restlessness, that I was unable to put into words. Walking along with the others, thinking about the day and how tomorrow they had school to go to, the week ahead and my lessons, and then it hit me.
Why didn't I do this before? How many days and nights, since I've come here, have I been content to just sit in a pub, going to the same places with the same people, doing the same things -- wasting time. What about all those people, the thousands upon thousands back there in that place. Children who never got to grow up; old people who committed suicide rather than spend the rest of their lives in prison. Writers who faced extermination with perhaps their best works still residing in them; countless many denied a future simply for being a certain race, or having certain beliefs -- marked for death before they were even born, before they had a chance just so they could fulfill the dreams of a maniac.
There were many lessons to be found at Terezin, but for me on this lovely fall afternoon, that was the saddest lesson. Not just that so many people perished, their lives unfulfilled; but that so many of us with the privilege to live fail to live fully and honorably.
My last image is of a score of music. The composer's name wasn't there, the exact name of the piece eludes me. But I remember looking at that piece, the last page of it open and on display under glass. I studied music at university, but it's been years since I read through a score. For a moment I tried to follow the notes of the piece, to try to summon in my mind the phrases the composer intended, to hear the music as it was meant to be heard. My eye fell on a line of sixteenth notes, slurred together, with a rest on the first sixteenth of each measure. But there was no marking which voice it was, and my skills were too rudimentary and rusty to pull the whole thing together. The notes connected like dots for a moment, but no melody, no music. I should have studied harder in school -- I could have heard that music, and saved it, saved for the lost one who wrote it that which too often expires on the breath, the inexpressible.
I supposed that's what I meant when I said the saddest lesson.

Via Prague

Literary and other offerings from former Times-Standard reporter James Tressler, who is living, teaching and writing in Prague.

The Saddest Lesson

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