|
|
** CZECH REPUBLIC 2009 - Weeks 8~10 ** |
||
|
This web edition is
dedicated to the lasting memory of the Czech villages of LEŽÁKY
and LIDICE, |
|||
 CZECH REPUBLIC
2009 - Central and Northern Bohemia:
Across open agricultural countryside, we passed into Central Bohemia to approach
the town of Kutná Hora. With the discovery of rich silver deposits in the 14th
century, Kutná Hora became one of Bohemia's most wealthy towns, second only in
importance to Prague. King Václav II founded the royal mint here, bringing in
German miners to exploit the silver seams and Italian silver-smiths to produce
the silver Prague Groschen (pražské groše), coins widely used through-out
Central Europe because of their high silver content, literally worth their weight
in silver. Kutná Hora's wealth from its silver and
its prestigious position as royal
With the Hussite and Thirty Years Wars, and the
16th century drying up of the silver deposits, Kutná Hora's importance declined
and today is a small provincial town of 20,000 population. The great monuments
of its silver mining heyday still decorate the town, particularly the
magnificent masterpiece of St Barbara's Cathedral (patron saint of miners), one of Central Europe's great Gothic doms, and our main reason for visiting the town (Photo 1 - Gothic Cathedral of Saint Barbara at Kutná Hora).
The church's upper structure bristles with pinnacles, turrets and flying
buttresses in a fanfare of Gothic splendours supporting the three-towered roof.
The plain Gothic nave with The former fortress of Hrádek housed the Silver Museum, a unique feature of which was a 400m long medieval silver mining tunnel running 40m below the town. Kitted out with period miners' work-wear, hard-hats and lamps, we were led along the narrow shaft, and later shown the smelting processes. For three centuries, coins were minted at the town's Vlašský dvůr (Italian Court) named after the Italian craftsmen brought in to produce the coins which were the source of the town's wealth, the Groschen and later under Habsburg rule, silver Thalers which gave us the modern currency name of dollars.
After a night's camp amid autumn leaves at the
delightfully straightforward Rovište Autocamp in the middle Vltava valley, we crossed the
wide river and continued westwards to Příbram, a mining town which
bristled with factory chimneys and merciless traffic. The mines closed in the
1990s and In 2000, the Czech government preserved the former camp as a
permanent memorial to the horrors inflicted during 40 years of Communism and the
sufferings of innocents who had dared to oppose the regime. As we drove out
from Příbram, we passed the rusting headstocks and spoil heaps of the now
closed uranium mines, and in an open clearing among pine woods beyond the
village of Lešetice, we reached the camp's gates We headed north to descend to Autocamp Zadní
Třeboň Ostrov set on an island in the sluggish River Berounka and accessed by a
narrow bridge. Our reason for coming was to coincide our visit to the show-case
Castle of Karlštejn with the village's Wine Festival. Karlštejn spreads along a
After our three
days in Prague (see record of our visit), we continued westwards to visit the scene of yet another 20th
century tragedy, the memorial site of Lidice 18kms from the capital. Heydrich's
assassination in May 1942 enraged the German high command who sought revenge on
the Czech population. Lidice was a small village of 500 inhabitants with a
school and a church; most of the men folk worked in the
Unlike Ležáky which suffered a similar fate a few days
later (see record of our visit),
Lidice was rebuilt after the war immediately alongside the site of the destroyed
village and the few survivors rehoused; arriving here and aware of the tragic
history, the modern settlement seemed
The road towards Northern Bohemia rose onto a high
plateau with broad vistas across fertile arable land and in the distance the
hazy outline of the Krušné hory (Ore Mountains) which forms the modern border
with Germany and whose name evokes the area's historical exploitation of iron
Since 1989, successive Czech governments
cajoled by EU subsidies, have gone to creditable lengths to clean up this
ghastly inheritance from the Communist years. Like it or not, the coming online
of the country's second nuclear power station at Temelin (see record of our visit)
has enabled older coal-fired stations to be closed, and smoke filters have been
installed at the largest power plants. Vast areas of land devastated
Terezin is another name to conjure up chilling
memories. Founded originally in the 1780s as a Habsburg fortress defending the
border with
The
Small Fortress prison has been retained in its WW2 state as a memorial, and our
English-speaking guide showed us around the appalling conditions with a thorough
and frank commentary. Over the gate into one of the prison compounds, the
cynical words Arbeit macht frei
greeted
Stunned with grief and anger at what we had seen,
we walked across to the stark and awesomely intact red-brick walls and moat of
the huge Main Fortress. Never in its history put to the test in
defending the Habsburg Empire against external attack, the fortress town within
We walked through the dreary grid of streets to the fortress' central square to find the Muzeum Ghetta, set up in 1991 only after the fall of Communism which had consistently denied the Jewish perspective on Terezin. The museum presented a detailed account in frank and truthful terms of Terezin's tragic story and the dreadful events which took place here between 1941~45. And yet again, German tourists wandered around the chilling displays with seemingly arrogant indifference to what their fathers and grandfathers had committed here. Across the town, the former Magdeburg Barracks, used as the Jewish council's offices, is now set up as a museum documenting the remarkable artistic achievements of the ghetto. One room tried to recreate a semblance of the overcrowded conditions of a women's dormitory (Photo 16 - Inhuman overcrowded conditions at Terezin Jewish ghetto).
Relieved to be driving from Terezin, we headed
north following the broad valley of the merged Rivers Vltava and Labe, winding through the gloomy
hills to Dečin. This mighty waterway, whose two source rivers we had followed
across the country from their origins, would soon pass
As further encouragement to fellow
travellers to visit the Czech Republic, we shall be publishing the postscript edition in a
couple of weeks with our now customary Review of Czech
Campsites and Travel Tips, sharing our hard-won
experiences of the last 10 weeks.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
mint was used for the construction of
magnificent churches. 
its lofty ribbed vaulting was largely uncluttered, leaving the eye to focus on
the magnificent carved wooden altarpiece of the Last Supper (Photo 2 - Gothic interior and carved wooden altarpiece of Kutná Hora Cathedral).
Medieval frescoes around the ambulatory depicted Kutná Hora's 15th century
silver miners and coin-minters at work.
The suburbs of Kutná Hora house another
curiosity, some might say a grotesque monstrosity - the Ossuary (kostnice) of
Sedlec. When holy soil from Golgotha was sprinkled over the Monastery graveyard,
anyone who was anyone in Bohemia wanted to be buried here; plagues and
pestilence over the centuries added to the 1000s of burials and the bones piled
up. By 1870, something had to be done about the overflowing ossuary and František Rint was charged to solve the problem of skeletal excesses. Rising to
the challenge, he created four enormous pyramids of human bones which now fill
the corners of the ossuary, covered the walls with skeletal decorations, all lit
by a chandelier made up of every bone in the human body. And over 100 years
later, this bizarrely macabre spectacle in the subterranean crypt forms the most
grotesquely ghoulish spectacle for tourists to gawp salaciously at; admittedly
curiosity got the better of us! (Photo 3 - Ghoulish
displays at Kutná Hora Ossuary).
now form the Mining Museum portraying the town's long history of
mining. To older Czechs however, Příbram has more spine-chilling
associations: between 1951~61, 1000s of political opponents of the Communist
regime were detained without trial in forced labour camps and worked or
brutalised to death in the notorious uranium mines just south of the town. The Vojna camp near Příbram was built in 1947 for German WW2 POWs, but was
taken
over by the Communists after the 1948 coup d'état as a hard labour political prison.
As the Cold War nuclear arms race intensified, the Soviets imposed a deal on the
puppet Czech state to supply uranium ore for the developing Soviet nuclear
industry. Political opponents, including democrats, lawyers, clergy, sportsmen
as well as convicted criminals, were detained in the forced labour camp to
provide slave labour for the Příbram uranium mines. Such was the
Soviet-backed Communist regime's ruthless crushing of all opposition that there
was a ready supply of prisoner slave-labour during the ten years of operation to
replace those who were worked or starved to death in the camp's appalling
conditions. Those forced to work in the uranium mines must have been subjected
to a constant atmosphere of radioactivity from the ore and radon gas; even
if they survived to be released in the 1961 amnesty, they would inevitably have
succumbed to cancers from unprotected exposure to radioactivity during their
forced detention behind barbed wire.
which are still surmounted by the Czech words
Prací ke Svobodé, cynically mimicking the Arbeit macht frei
of German concentration camps (Photo
4 - Gate of the Vojna Communist forced labour camp). Twin barbed wire
fencing with intervening guard dog patrol-alleyway surrounded the main area of
the camp with watch-towers at the corners. It was indeed a eerily chilling
feeling entering through those gates. Some of the barrack huts have been
preserved with metal framed bunks and only thin army blankets as protection
against the raw cold of winter; one hut was laid out as a 'culture centre' ie
re-indoctrination hut with portraits of Stalin and Gottwald peering from the
wall. We were shown the solitary confinement punishment block with tiny bare
concrete cells, bare wooden beds and latrine buckets. In the former camp HQ
building, displays graphically documented the Communist regime's systematic suppression of all
forms of opposition to enforce its hold on power through terror tactics. The
camp was backed by the spoil heaps of the uranium mine where the prisoners were
compelled to work, and it was fortunate that the sun shone to relieve the chill
gloom of this dreadful place. We have visited some emotionally gruelling places
during our travels, but never before have we felt so glad to be driving away. Vojna forced labour camp and uranium mine was something of a perverse place for
Paul to spend his birthday. (Photo 5 - Communist Vojna forced labour camp near Příbram).
Visit the Memorial's web site: 
side
valley which is dominated by the huge bulk of the Hrad (Castle) which towers in
a spectacular and impregnable position high above the village. The Castle had
been built in the 14th century by King Charles IV as a safe-box for the Bohemian
crown jewels and all the holy relics he had collected on his warring travels.
The village street was lined
with both the inevitable tacky souvenir sellers and food and drinks stalls; the
atmosphere on Wine Festival weekend was jovial with street musicians and locals
dressed in medieval costume. As we walked up the increasingly steep village
street, the brooding presence of the Castle loomed overhead (Photo 6 -
Karlštejn Castle on Wine Festival weekend),
and in the courtyard of the Castle, musicians playing medieval music entertained
the crowds; instruments included the traditional Bohemian bagpipes called
dudy which we had seen in museums in the south. Inevitably the girl
skilfully playing these was labelled by us Judy the Dudy
(Photo 7 -
Traditional Bohemian dudy
(bagpipes)). The outrageously expensive
entrance fee of 250Kč (£8.25) for the Castle would not have been out of place in
greed-ridden Britain, and certainly was beyond the income of most Czechs. When
you took into account the little there was to see in the Castle's rooms sparsely
furnished with crudely mock 19th century Renaissance replicas and utterly
uninspiring displays of repro-portraits of Bohemian royalty, the whole
experience of a visit to Karlštejn Castle was a fraudulent rip-off and best
avoided. Having said that, the Wine Festival with its music and medieval jollity
more than made up for the over-promoted, over-expensive tedium of the castle
visit.
mines
and foundries of nearby Kladno. In the eyes of the vengeful Germans, the flimsiest of evidence
was enough to mark Lidice as a
community guilty of conspiracy in the Heydrich killing. The village would hit world headlines
on 10 June 1942, the day it ceased to exist. That morning, squads of SS arrived at the village.
All 173 males over 15 were rounded up and shot on the spot; even 2 in
hospital were returned to the village to be shot; the village was burnt to the ground; the 198
women were separated from their children and dispatched to Ravensbrück
concentration camp; of the 89 children, a few considered Aryan enough for 'Germanisation'
were packed off to German families for adoption, the majority were sent with
just the clothes they stood in to camps in Poland for gassing in vans adapted for
killing by exhaust fumes. Not content with filming the murder of
the men folk and destruction of homes, school and church, the Germans even dug
up coffins from the graveyard to destroy the remains of the village dead. This
utter crime against humanity reverberated around the world. Hitler wanted Lidice
'wiped from the face of the earth'; instead very soon, the 'Lidice shall live'
campaign ensured that the world would indeed remember Lidice as a symbol of
resistance. Towns and cities began twinning themselves with Lidice to keep alive
the memory of an innocent community destroyed by yet another German act of
barbaric atrocity. Thankfully, the Germans' own film of the destruction of
Lidice was used as evidence in 1945 war crimes trials, and those guilty of these
mass murders were hanged.
perversely unexceptional. From the memorial, we looked out across the parkland
where the old village once stood. The museum told Lidice's story and documented the
destruction of an innocent community, with footage filmed by the Germans as they
blew up homes. Photos of murdered Lidice residents lined the walls along with a
plaque recording their names (see right); the most moving spectacle however were
the reproduced letters sent by Lidice children from the camps appealing to
relatives to send more clothes. By the time these letters were received, the
children had already been gassed. We walked silently down the hill past the
remains of the village where a bronze memorial in the form of a large group of
children symbolises those murdered from Lidice (Photo 8 -
Lidice Memorial to children
murdered by German atrocity in June 1942).
The emotion which the atmosphere of this now empty place created evoked in us an
overwhelming feeling of sorrow and anger. Certainly we shall do our part in
ensuring that Lidice will never be forgotten. Any nation that turns its creative
ability to designing vans especially adapted to gassing children with exhaust
fumes forfeits the right to be considered part of the civilised world. The blood
of Lidice and the many other communities across Europe destroyed by such
atrocities will stain with guilt the German nation for generations to come.
Žatec is the home of hop-growing par excellence, to be more precise
the Red Saaz hop
which supports the Czech brewing industry. This year's crop had
long since been harvested leaving the frames standing gaunt and empty, whereas
in mid summer, the dense hop plants would present a massive green spectacle
twining their way around strings suspended from the frames which stand some 15
feet high. All that remained of this year's plants were a few tendrils clinging
to the top wires and heaps of rotting hop plant debris (Photo 9 -
Žatec hopfields for Bohemian Red Saaz hops).
The town of Žatec had historically been mainly Czech, but successive waves of
German immigrants altered the population balance until the post-WW2 forceful
eviction of the Sudetan Germans left the town severely under populated. These
days new waves of Roma Gypsy and Vietnamese immigrants make Žatec not a place to
hang around in for long. Even so, the central square with its tall-towered
radnice (town hall), cluttered plague column, heavily arcaded shops and its
small promotional hop garden in one corner is an attractive place (Photo 10 -
Žatec central square with plague column). 
ore and other mineral deposits. A night's camp by the River Ohře near to Kadaň
gave further views of the hills (Photo 11 - Ore Mountains backdrop to North
Bohemian camp). Below the line of hills lies the North Bohemian brown-coal basin; after 40
years of unrestrained industrialisation during the Communist era, this part of
the Ohře valley was until recently even less attractive than the name
implies. Stretching
60 kms from Kadaň in the west to Ústí nad Labem in the east, this area of
Northern Bohemia is scarred by an almost continuous rash of opencast mines
interspersed with prefabricated towns like Chomutov. Most of the country's brown
coal (lignite) is mined here from just 10m below the surface leaving huge
swathes of land scoured into an indescribably barren waste land, an arid
wilderness of opencast pits. 240 square kilometres of countryside has been
destroyed by mining since 1950. Not only is the brown coal mined here, but most
is also burned here to fuel the rash of lignite-burning powers stations which
litter the valley; and brown coal is by far the most pollutant of all fossil
fuels. We had previously seen the damage caused to trees by acid rain from former
industrial pollution, and at one time dense winter smog filled the valley giving
the region's inhabitants a life expectancy seven years less than the European average. Understandably therefore, Northern Bohemia is not usually on the regular tourist
route.
by former mining have been reclaimed and landscaped with forestry planting. But we had to see for ourselves
how bad the impact of such intensive mining was, and how successful
government efforts had been to reduce levels of pollutant emissions and recover
land scarred by mining and ash tipping: had the ecological disaster of the
Communist period been averted, and at what cost in terms of unemployment through
scaling down of industry?
Down
a back road beyond the Ohře reservoir, we stopped by the huge Tušimice
power station to photograph the smoking chimney-stack and steam billowing from the
cooling towers, half expecting alarm bells to start ringing and guards to come
running; but all we heard was the hum of the generators. The fitting of filters
certainly seemed to have reduced the former filthy brown smoke emissions to an
innocuous white plume
(Photo 12 - Lignite-burning power station at Tušimice).
At the nearby Prunéřov generating plant, it was the same story (see right). The
map showed huge areas of countryside on both
sides of the main west~east Route 13 scoured by opencast mining; giant diggers
crawling across great open pits of grey sludge showed that this was still an
area of working mines, but clearly much had been done to reclaim derelict
land and plant forestry screening. The dereliction was worst around Litvínov
where a horrendous industrial complex of oil refineries, chemical works,
factories, power plants, smoking chimneys, and network of pipes and towers
provided local employment. The impact of mining is more evident at the nearby
town of Most which was partly demolished in the 1960s to make way for the
ever-expanding lignite extraction. Perhaps more to demonstrate their technical
rather than aesthetic prowess, Communist central planning spent vast amounts on
physically transporting the huge Gothic church of St Mary on specially designed
railway tracks some 841m to a new site where it now stands in gloomy isolation,
stranded between mine and motorway
(Photo 13 - Google Earth
image: open cast mines
resulting in the demolition of Most).
If ever you go there, ask to see the video documenting the church's move.
expansionist
Prussia, Terezin housed a garrison town within the huge star-shaped fortress.
The Small Fortress just across the Ohře river was converted to a military
prison housing political opponents of Habsburg rule, the most famous being the
young Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in
Sarajevo precipitating WW1; he died of tuberculosis in a Terezin prison cell in
1918. It was during WW2 however that Terezin earned its worldwide notoriety. In
1940 the Terezin Small Fortress was converted into a Gestapo prison for
political prisoners, initially members of the Resistance. During the
course of WW2, 32,000 prisoners including 5,000 women were interned at Terezin.
Most were moved on to concentration camps, but some 2,600 prisoners died here of
harsh living conditions, starvation, brutality, torture and typhoid. Then in
late 1941, the 3,000 residents of the town of Terezin were turned out and the
barracks of main fortress converted into transit ghetto for deported Czech Jews
en route to the extermination camps particularly Auschwitz.
new arrivals whose prison clothes were flagged with coloured markers
indicating their so-called offence: red triangle 
for political prisoners, yellow
Star of David for Jews (Photo 14 - Terezin WW2 prison: Arbeit macht frei). The stark multi-occupancy cells and solitary confinement
punishment block graphically showed the cramped conditions in which prisoners
were kept, half-starved, inadequately clothed with little or no heating, with
primitive bucket sanitation, and subject to indiscriminate brutality by sadistic
guards. When in 1944 the International Red Cross inspected Terezin, the Germans
gave the prison a superficial 'beautification'; the IRC inspectors were duly
fobbed off and filed a satisfactory report on conditions here. It was however
satisfying to hear that the prison commandant, Heinrich Jöckul notorious for his
brutality, was eventually tried and hanged in 1946, having been detained in his own cells.
Outside the fortress, the memorial gardens of the National Cemetery contained
both the individual and mass graves of those who had died at the hands of the
Germans at Terezin both in the political prison and the Jewish ghetto (Photo
15 - Memorial cemetery to victims of Terezin prison and ghetto).
the star-shaped walls survived intact. Built in the 18th century around a grid
plan of dour barracks to house its garrison, today it is a soulless almost eerie
place, its unkempt streets almost empty apart from the few sad-looking residents
still living there. In 1941 however, with its vast barracks enclosed by fortress
walls and on the main railway line into Germany, Terezin was the perfect site
for a transit camp staging post for gathering together Jews deported from the
Czech lands and other occupied countries, for onward transportation to Auschwitz
and other extermination camps. Within a year, 60,000 Jews were interned in this
confined space in appallingly overcrowded and insanitary
conditions. By late
1942, the monthly death rate rose to 4,000. By the end of the war, 155,000 Jews,
including 10,500 children, had passed through the Terezin ghetto en route for
fulfilling the perverted German Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final solution for
the Jewish question), the planned genocide of the entire Jewish race. Of
these, 35,000 died from disease and starvation in the dreadful living conditions
of the overcrowded ghetto, and 83,000 were murdered after onward transportation
to the death camps. Of the total number of Terezin victims, just 3,600 survived.
In the closing days of the war as the Allies advanced from the west and Red Army
from the east, 15,000 more Jewish survivors of the death marches from evacuated
concentration camps arrived at Terezin further to exacerbate the overcrowded
insanitary conditions. Epidemics of typhus delayed the eventual liberation of
the ghetto. With perverted German irony, Terezin was also put to another purpose:
false propaganda to hoodwink the international community into disbelieving
rumours about the Germans' genocidal intentions. Films were produced presenting
Terezin as a self-governing contented community,
with
Jewish council, local (but worthless money), shops selling belongings
confiscated from Jewish inmates, and Jewish cultural events. The deceit worked
and IRC visits reported satisfactory conditions in Terezin ghetto.
into eastern
Germany to become the Elbe. We diverted into the misty hills to see the
geological curiosity of Panská skála, a localised outcrop of basalt columns. The
aeons old outcrop had been formed by magma forced upwards and rapidly cooling on the earth's surface to fractionate into
pentagonal columns, some 50 feet tall at the highest point
(Photo 17 - Outcrop of basalt columns at Panská
skála).
Our time in the Czech Republic was drawing to its autumnal close, but we had a
final two days to enjoy the delights of the Kamenice Gorge in so-called Bohemian
Switzerland, České Švýcarsko. Some five kms up into the narrow wooded valley, we
reached Menzí Louka, its small campsite open until the end of October. The hotel
opposite was a dismal barn of a place but its bar provided welcome if expensive
beer on a dark and foully wet evening. The hills are popular with day trippers
across the border from Germany, and a regular bus service operates along the
valley to Hřensko, making possible a circular route from the campsite along the
Kamenice Gorge. A well-constructed path shelves along the bed of the gorge just
above the river, with rock walls towering above and sunlight filtering down
through the overhanging beech trees lighting the golden autumn colours. Further
up the gorge, the river deepened, running silently still through the Quiet Gorge
(Tichá soutĕska); boatmen convey visitors in punts along a 1km stretch of murky
canyon whose moss-covered rock walls rise sheer on both sides (Photo 18 - Punting along Kamenice Gorge).
From a higher landing stage, the path continues passing under rocky overhangs along
confines of the gorge, leading across the river and back up the steep valley
side to Menzí Louka (Photo 19 - Kamenice Gorge in Čéske
Švýcarsko).
We
saved the most spectacular feature of the České Švýcarsko for our final day.
The Pravčická brána is the largest natural rock bridge in Central Europe, rising
16m high and 27m high above the pine and beech covered hills. The approach path
rises steeply through dark woods, zigzagging around huge weathered outcrops of
sandstone rock which towered above. The natural rock bridge was formed by the
erosion of a weakness in such a projecting rib of sandstone. The path clambers
precariously onto the crest of a neighbouring spur to give a superb vantage
point for viewing the rock bridge (Photo 20 - Pravčická brána natural rock bridge). So often
our trips seem to peter
out with an anticlimactic ending and a poor campsite. Not so this trip: two excellent days walking in Bohemian Switzerland's exciting
terrain, with beautiful autumn weather and a worthy last campsite were an
impressive climax. Returning to
the valley, we stowed our boots, and at 3-00pm on the day of the 20th
anniversary of the fall of Communism, we crossed the undistinguished border into
what until then had been East Germany; it felt as if we were sneaking out of
Czech Republic's back door to begin our journey home.
