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Like moths to a flame, Prague's countless tourists swarm around the Old City streets, flitting in and out of the endless & identically-kitsch tourist shops, alighting nowhere for long. For most cities, however enchanting, this would be enough to wear the charm thin - very quickly... =/ But Prague is an untouchably magical place - a deep-dreaming city of cobbled lanes, Gothic spires and refreshingly-diverse architecture. And one of the most magical places of all is Staromestske nam, (Old Town square), at dusk. The twin Gothic spires of Tyn Church hang - a pair of sharp-winged bats - over one side of the square, while the other is dominated by the Town Hall, (with its much-vaunted but ultimately anticlimactic - Is that it?! - astronomical clock).

Prague/Krakow: Dreams, Dragons & Nazi Death Camps

Michael Meadows
2007-04-21 21:27:46

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comes a point when your mind gives a violent shudder of revulsion and tries to block out any more. You simply don't want to hear how many people were killed in this gas chamber that you're now standing in. Or what sort of experiments - more ghastly than in any horror movie - were carried out in this gynecological hospital. Or how many mothers - stripped naked, clutching emaciated babies to their breasts - were shot dead against this wall, (although an 'inefficient' method of execution/murder, one camp commandant insisted on it occasionally because he said he liked "to see the fear in their eyes"). I felt my own eyes starting to glaze over a bit and my heart hardening itself, under the incessant battering of all these facts & figures of atrocity & pure evil. And for a while, this seems to work. The figures being reeled off to you, hard to fully comprehend right from the beginning, start to become just numbers, abstract, almost meaningless.

Once the grand scale of the Nazi evil has become too vast to comprehend at all anymore, it's the individual, specific details that still get through to you. A corridor lined with prisoner mug-shots, in which you see the full range of possible reactions & expressions - some faces are angry, others sad or resigned, some are obviously terrified, most are confused, and a few smile nervously - still not understanding the staggering horror of their situation. Or a room filled with mountains of shoes - you feel sick when you think that the vast majority of the people who once wore these shoes died horrible deaths. And then even worse when you realise what a tiny fraction of the whole this room represents. A grainy black-and-white photo of a family being torn apart, confused toddlers stretching out their tiny arms as far as they can, their anguished faces caught in a silent & eternal scream. In the next room, an unassuming glass cabinet displaying a few rolls of rough cloth woven from human hair. And then there are pile upon pile of confiscated items - glasses, suitcases, clothing, kitchen utensils... As I walked around the camps, the question that kept hammering away at me was not so much 'why?' (Can something like this - something difficult to call by any other name than 'evil' - actually be fully explained?) The question that seemed more important to me at the time was 'how'?!... How could this have happened? How could it possibly have been allowed to take place and to go as far as it did?! Could it have happened anywhere in the world? (To which I think the answer is a definite 'yes'.) How could we humans - simultaneously capable of such compassion, selflessness, beauty & love - how could we possibly sink so unbelievably, despicably low?! And could it happen again?...

I left Auschwitz that day a little less sure of humanity than when I went in.