The Holocaust in Prague

Welcome to Pinkas Synagogue, a 16th century building in the heart of the old Jewish Quarter that became one of Europe's earliest Holocaust memorials. Every wall inside is covered with names. Not printed. Not engraved. Hand painted. Between 1955 and 1959, two Czech painters, Jiří John and Václav Boštík, worked without templates to inscribe 77,297 names of Bohemian and Moravian Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Four years. Every name. Every birth date. Every death date or deportation date when death was unknown. They used color: yellow for towns, red for surnames, black for dates. Names grouped by where victims last lived. The memorial opened in 1960. Eight years later, it closed. The Communist regime claimed moisture damage. Really, it was politics. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, the names sat hidden for over 20 years. When Czechoslovakia regained freedom in 1989, the walls had deteriorated. The inscriptions had to be painstakingly recreated. The memorial reopened in 1996. Upstairs, there is an exhibition of drawings by children from Terezín concentration camp. Most of those children were murdered in Auschwitz. Their teacher, Friedl Dicker Brandeis, hid the drawings before her own deportation. The drawings survived. The building you are looking at is a gravestone. For 77,297 people who have no other.