My wife and I recently returned from a trip up the Danube. We began at Budapest, paused at Vienna, and ended our river cruise at Passau in Germany. But our climactic stop was at Prague in the Czech Republic. Before we went, many people told us that Prague was special, and they were right! It is one of those places that enchants and makes you think—all at the same time.
The city that most reminded me of Prague was Paris. Each is elegant in its own way, with both possessing an outdoor café ambiance that invites sitting down—and in the case of Prague drinking a beer—so as to converse amiably with friends. When one does, the surrounding cityscape captivates with the humanity in its dimensions and artistic sophistication of its architecture.
But Prague has the edge in being older and more historic. Most Westerns are not familiar with the city’s storied past, yet the evidence is everywhere. So too are the building facades festooned in paintings and sculptures. Indeed, there is so much to be seen that it is easy to overlook its profusion.
Prague also has the advantage in being a friendlier place than Paris. A bit smaller and more intimate, one does not get the sense of being a visiting barbarian—as is frequently the case in France. The Czechs know they are few in number and relatively impotent compared to their more powerful neighbors, hence they keep their pretensions to a minimum.
I was also compelled to compare Prague with my once hometown of New York. Both are tourist Meccas, but what they choose to push on the visitor is very different. In New York’s Times Square one is constantly accosted by strangers handing out flyers for girly shows, whereas in Prague’s Old Town the flyers advertise concerts featuring the works of Mozart and Dvorak.
All this made a deep impression, but even more potent in their impact were the reverberations of the Holocaust. I had not gone to Europe with the expectation of revisiting the horrors of World War II; nevertheless they were still close to the surface. The sightseer did non have to ask about these matters; the locals volunteered them.
Thus, it turned out that one of the major stops on the Prague tourist circuit was the old Ghetto. And one of its major attractions was an old synagogue dedicated to remembering the victims of Hitler’s homicidal deportations. There, by the tens of thousands, on its interior walls were their neatly lettered names. Included among them, needless to say, were several with the surname Fein. They were almost certainly not my relatives given that my father’s family lived in Poland; still the connection brought their deaths close to home.
But something else left me more shaken. It was the fact that the adjacent cemetery was twenty feet above street level. This was so because during the Middle Ages the size of the Ghetto was stagnant. Because the authorities would not allow the Jews to reside beyond its walls, the space allocated for burials was too small to accommodate the growing demand.
As a result, bodies were buried on top of bodies until the pile was at least twelve deep. This was confirmed by the generations of tombstones that were also piled on one another as the assemblage expanded. Deeply weathered, and for the most part unreadable, they too bore names with which I was familiar.
This was distressing, but even more distressing was a casual remark made by our guide. She noted that the residents of the Ghetto were as tightly confined as their dead. They too had to contend with arbitrarily space limitations. As a consequence, they were more closely packed together as their population grew.
It was this overcrowding that almost brought tears to my eyes. It made me realize that my ancestors must have lived very uncomfortable lives thanks to the discrimination with which they contended. They survived, but for centuries this could not have been easy.
This then put me in mind of the people who did the confining. It also provoked thoughts of those who perpetrated the Holocaust. After all, their descendents surrounded me throughout our trip. Nevertheless, what was most remarkable about them was that—for the most part—they were ordinary and basically decent human beings. Far from monsters, they were not unlike my wife and myself.
And so the bottom line, the one that shook me the most, was the realization is that I too was probably capable of perpetrating atrocities. As Hannah Arendt long ago opined, evil can indeed be banal. Its seeds are within all of us, even when people live in cities as captivating as Prague.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
No comments:
Post a Comment