It’s early afternoon on Sunday, June twenty-fourth of this year. I am in Prague walking along a well-kept gravel path down a long wall from the entrance to The New Jewish Cemetery. I find Franz Kafka’s grave just opposite a memorial to his friend, Max Brod, snap a few forbidden pictures hoping that God will forgive me and thinking that some pilgrimage has now ended. Earlier in the day, my beloved and I visited the Old New Synagogue and walked down Maiselova Street where the day before we had struggled through a tour of the other old city synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetary in a pouring rainstorm that made it difficult to orient oneself geographically.

We were at the end of our tour and had by this time seen a good many things that evoked the memory European Jewry, but neither of us was quite prepared to find that the synagogues of old Prague are mostly museums. The Old New Synagogue is still in use as a house of prayer, but when I asked a docent there how many were in attendance at the Saturday service, she told me apologetically that she didn’t know because she isn’t Jewish. Then she speculated that mostly visitors had attended because the congregation is very small. “There aren’t many Orthodox Jews left in Prague,” she sighed ruefully.

Brooding over these perceptions is the memory
of our visit to Auschwitz, in Poland, almost two weeks before. Here’s the main gate at Auschwitz I, the first part of the camp (formerly an army barracks), with the infamous inscription Arbeit Macht Frei that was used throughout the Nazi system of concentration camps. And here’s a picture of some of our group entering the room where so many were murdered. Inside this bunker-like structure is a large room with openings in the ceiling, used to introduce Zyklon B gas, and a smaller room housing two ovens that were used to burn the bodies. This relatively small facility at Auschwitz I was used before (and after) the killing factory was built at Auschwitz-Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, a few miles away. The Nazis blew up the gas chambers and ovens at Auschsitz II when they abandoned the camp. It’s very hard to be at Auschwitz. Our program director, a lovely polish man named Marek Gajewski, told us that he has special respect for the people who work as guides at the death camps.

Marek’s father had spent time in the Soviet Gulag. He was a concert pianist, so his tormentors broke all his fingers. The most important thing I learned in Eastern Europe, I think, is that the memory of the Nazi terror and the Soviet terror that followed are vivid and contemporary. It is as though they happened only yesterday. I will never forget Marek’s account, as we drove along a now beautiful bridge across the Vistula from Warsaw to Praga, Poland (where much of the film, The Pianist was made), how the Soviet army had watched the almost total destruction of Warsaw by Hitler’s departing forces (when they could have prevented it) and walked into the city to take control afterwards.

Here’s a picture of part of the memorial to the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. It was this uprising that so angered Hitler that he ordered the total destruction of the city. Poles are understandably proud of this event in their history, when a small irregular army of fighters held off the Wehrmacht for some two months, especially since the Soviets would not allow them to celebrate it. It’s now honored not only by this large monument, but by a fine new museum in Warsaw.

Back to Prague. Here’s the Old New Synagogue, completed in 1270 by most accounts. Small as it is, it has a feeling of loftiness and amplitude inside. The entrance now after centuries is well below street level. Its tiny reading desks suggest that it was built for humans much smaller than we moderns are on average. But it’s lovely, simple and clean and cozy, nothing ostentatious, nothing too much. I wasn’t allowed to photograph the interior, but you can see a couple of nice interior shots at Wikipedia and here. I’ve read with some dismay accounts of violent disputes at the Old New Synagogue recently. Though I don’t entirely understand what I read it appears that identity politics is everywhere, even in this venerable place.

It was the law in most of Europe for centuries that synagogues could not be taller than churches. Here, The Church of Our Lady Before Tyn utterly dominates the old town square, its haughty towers a reminder of the fate of Jan Hus and his followers. Last summer the statue of Hus in the center of the square was being
refurbished, so that one saw this wrap instead. The guys in the band here were playing dixieland, not badly either.

Prague is seriously crowded with tourists. This band in the middle of the square was surrounded by a pretty large crowd of folks listening or on their way, as we were, somewhere else.

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Heres a shot of the present-day memorial at Mila 18 in what was once the Warsaw ghetto. Only a single section of wall remains of the Ghetto, itself. The uprising began April 19, 1943 and ended May 16 of the same year.

Here’s the entrance to Warsaw’s only surviving synagogue. It’s sort of hidden behind a Yiddish theater across the street from an imposing church which features a memorial to Pope John Paul II.

Here’s John Paul. Many of the Polish monuments to him feature signs and banners that read ‘Sainthood Now!’ The church seemed to me to be an industry in present-day Poland, much as it was until very recently in Ireland, much as it is in parts of South and Central America, enjoying great political power and broad popular support.

My Impression of Poland was that Poles are religious. Czechs are not, but I think Poles are. I saw multitudes kneeling at Czestochowa, even though we were not there during a season of pilgrimages, and I heard again and again how John Paul had ended the cold war.

Here’s a shot of the interior of the synagogue, the Nozyk Synagogue it’s called. I took this from the balcony (the women’s section). When we first arrived there was nobody in the office who could let us into the main level, but while we were there the rabbi came in and opened the doors for us.

The synagogue balcony also features several panels with photos like this one of old Warwaw at the time the Ghetto was being created. Before the ghetto uprising in 1943, over 300,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka. There is now a monument at the Umschlagplatz, the site of the railway assembly point from which Jews were transported.

Finally, for now, this picture is a teasure of a kind, a piece of serendipity, true and sad, and something else all at once. I took this on the main level of the synagogue, looking towards a south window. There’s absence in it, perhaps nostalgia for a time that can never come again, or maybe somebody just forgot his hat . . . .

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For the next good many posts I’m going to write about what I did this summer, a traditional back-to-school exercise. I’m creating a category called travel, because this will be mostly a travelogue, though Eastern Europe turned into a pilgrimage for me. I want to write about that, but I want to sort of sneak up on it. My beloved and I took a Grand Circle tour with a front-end extension in Berlin, but spiritually I think my tour began (and will always begin) in Poland. The thumbnails are live. I just don’t like the look of them with blue borders.

Here’s a picture of St. Mary’s Church in Krakow where a bugler blows the hours, standing in the tower to your right. Legend has it that the two church towers were built by two brothers; hence the difference between them. If you stand below at the right time and wave, the bugler will wave back, and he always stops halfway through the tune to honor a legend about a medieval bugler shot in the throat during a Tatar invasion.

Krakow is a lovely city. We didn’t begin to see it in the few days we were there, but loved it. I bought Kathleen a beautiful set of Amber beads, and we spend a lovely evening on the old town square eating pierogies and drinking beer, watching people, etc. We sat across from the church, on the other side of the old cloth hall, which is now filled with galleries of shops catering to tourists, and watched horse-drawn carriages queue up to solicit custom. Most of the horses seemed strong and well cared for. Some of them pranced like English carriage horses.

On the right is a view of the entrance to Oskar
Schindler’s factory. We went there one evening on our way to Kazimierz. On the left is an interior shot of the main building. The place is being turned into an arts center, though there was nothing in the galleries up these stairs at the time we were there. As nearly as I can tell, Polish emalia means enamel, or glaze, auf Englisch. Here’s an interesting link with the expression Emalienwaren in German. And there’s the very staircase I photographed in an older incarnation. If you read down the page you’ll find a mention of the conversion to an arts center that I noted. I think we were in between exhibits in the upstairs galleries. But I also think there’s still lots of work to be done before the place has a full new life. You’ll also see a plaque with the famous inscription, Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. I photographed it, but at a bad angle because I had to elbow my way past a crowd of my fellow tourists to get an unobstructed view. Finally, we saw this remarkable memorial the same evening we visited the Schindler factory–just drove by on the bus, and I wasn’t able to get back for pictures.

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