3. Holocaust

I feel tears pooling in my eyes, and I’m almost overwhelmed by what I’m seeing.  I shake my head in disbelief.  My voice wants to audibly say “no,” as if all of the names on the walls around me aren’t real.  But sadly, I know they are.  I’ve read about them and know that it took four years to engrave the 80,000 names of the Bohemian and Moravian Jewish Holocaust victims onto these synagogue walls.  My emotional reaction surprises me, and I take a moment to step outside before reading more.  I heard that the grandparents of Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, are listed here.  I don’t know why, but it feels like seeing them would be too much for me, so I don’t look for them.  Instead, I walk upstairs to the exhibition of children’s drawings that were created between 1942 and 1944 in the Terezin concentration camp.  I know that the majority of the children were deported to Auschwitz shortly after the pictures were drawn, and it was a teacher who preserved them by burying them in a suitcase underground.  I see her photo, and in my mind I thank her for protecting them for future generations to see.  If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be seeing these drawings of what it was like to be in Terezin through the eyes of a child.  Again I feel my eyes swell with tears.  The drawings are so innocently powerful.  I leave the room and go outside to the Old Jewish Cemetery, which contains 12,000 tombstones with more than 100,000 people buried.  I read that the bodies are buried ten layers deep since there was such limited space.  Jews weren’t allowed to be buried outside of the Prague Jewish ghetto, which is the part of town I’m in now.  I somberly walk along the path and see that the weathered tombstones are haphazardly placed in the earth.  Then I come upon the tombstone of great religious scholar and teacher Loew ben Bezalel.  I watch as a young woman places a tiny piece of white paper and a coin next to some stones on the small ledge of his tombstone.  She leans forward and kisses it.  Though her gesture is small, I feel its weight.