A Ghost Story

In early November of 2014, I visited Prague with a friend of mine whose parents were born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and lived through World War II, emigrating to the U.S. after the war. My friend's mother’s dearest high school friend, Renata Perutz, was Jewish and was imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp and died, a victim of the Nazi holocaust.

In Prague we visited the Pinkas Synagogue which was turned into a memorial to the holocaust. Inside the memorial, on tall white walls are written the names and dates of birth and death, in black and red letters, of the nearly 80,000 Jewish Czech victims of the holocaust. The dates of death are only estimates based on when these many souls were taken to one of the Nazi death camps. These names fill several rooms - there are far too many for one room and are grouped by the towns where the victims had lived. These white walls are the mass ‘graves’ of these souls - memorialized so that they might not be forgotten. On the high white walls of the main part of the synagogue/memorial are the names of the victims from Prague. My friend’s mother’s friend and her family are listed among the dead from Prague, visible in the photo below.

In another part of the museum are two rooms exhibiting children’s drawings from the Ghetto Theresienstadt. The children of Theresienstadt were entertained, distracted and enriched by art classes taught by the artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. The art the children of Theresienstadt created survived in hidden suitcases but the children did not. Most died in the gas chambers of the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Holocaust Museum in Prague honors these children in rooms dimmed to protect the artwork which depict life in the Ghetto, planes, blood, sadness and are wrenching to absorb. Observing these drawings preserved inside glass cases is a holy devotion, like visiting a graveyard, honoring the life of each child whose adult life was denied and wh