Dear rss free blog,
Curves in all the right places mark the Czech Capital where I am spending a few days floating on the River Vlatava in what is called a Botel.
The city is gorgeous, with a huge Castle and an old city full of high Gothic and Baroque buildings including a half dozen synagogues, but now no Jews to fill them. Luckily I have found a combination bagel store and Internet cafe run by a bunch of Israelis to file for you for Memorial Day. It marks the beginning of what used to be Chekoslovakia, one of the bits of Europe created after the Kaiser was removed from power. It took the Versailles treaty to get all the ducks in a row. But before that, a new Germany was created, on Nov. 9, 1918 with the abdication of the Kaiser and the birth of the Weimar Republic. Yesterday was the anniversary.
It was also the anniversary of an event nicely timed to take place exactly 5 years later, Hitler’s failed Bierhall Putsch. And again, because Hitler hated the Weimar Republic, Nov. 9 was the date selected fro Kristallnacht, the unleashing of the Nazi forces against Germany’s Jews, which took place in 1938 by which time my parents were already in the USA and married to each other.
So it especially ironic that the Berlin Wall also fell on that very same day. Two pluses and two minuses for Germany on the same date 81 years apart. Two days later the Armistice ended World War I, and that is the date commemorated as a US holiday.
Let us not forget how many brave soldiers like my two uncles (one per World War) died to bring us to this stage. And recall how many innocents died too, like the little Jewish children whose drawings from the Teresenstadt Concentration Camp were the most harrowing sight in Josefov, the old Jewish bit of Prague so far.
I did indeed visit the tomb of our Japanese reporter’s ancestor, the Maharlal, whose 600th birthday falls this year. I left a stone on his grave. But his monster, the Golem, did not succeed in protecting the little children who died in Teresenstadt, and who never even got a decent burial.
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