A beautiful day in a horrible place.

The day after the storm was beautiful in The Czech Republic. A bit brisk really and I think the cold air put some pep in our steps. We woke early to make our way to Terezin, a nazi concentration camp located an hour outside of Prague.

A short walk from our Hotel (which I highly recommend. The Hotel Leonardo has been amazing) is a subway stop and it took two subway lines and an hour bus ride to get to our destination. The thrill of the trip so far has been the escalator at the nearby subway entrance. It's easily 250 yards(!) straight down at a very high speed. I'm not kidding, the wind rushes in your hair and your initial reaction is like hitting the giant drop of a roller coaster. I have a picture posted on flickr, which is where I'll be posting these pictures for the time being.

So the Czech Republic is not big on signs for anything. I found out yesterday that people destroy signs whenever the country is invaded as a way of disorienting their enemies... Which I think tourists are now considered because they don't make it easy, anyway after some crisscrossing and questioning of strangers we found our way to the right bus and soon on our way. Terezin was a thriving community built inside a fortress that was an outpost of the 18th century Habsburg empire. The ramparts and high protective walls where separated in very few places for roads, which made it easy for the nazis to close up and form a prison out of the old fortress and stuffed 58,000 people into a town that had held only 7,000 a few months prior. No Jews were killed here intentionally, rather this was a propaganda camp which was used to show "how good the Jews had it" to the Red Cross and the world. They even shot a movie there showing people playing soccer and singing songs. This only lasted a short time before the nazis decided it was too difficult to keep the Jews locked up and soon the orders to ship the Jews to Auschwitz came... very sad indeed. The town has never quite recovered to this day and has a very real feeling of a ghost town. There are inhabitants, cafes, bars, hotels, stores, yet few people beyond tourists are ever seen and those that are seen wandering seem destitute. It seems the nazis cruelty didn't end at the end of the war for this little town...

I've been able to link to my flickr account so check in there from time to time for photos from the trip.