Adventures in Prague!: Terezín, Litomerice and Lidice Field Trip

[As a heads up this is a rather sad post so read as you please.] So on Friday morning, we had to leave at 8:30, the program I am on planned a trip to Terezín and Litomerice. So we hoped on the bus and headed toward Lidice. Lidice is a village North West of Prague about 30 minutes away. Lidice was built on the site of a previous village with the same name; which the Nazis created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which was, as per orders directly from Heinrich Himmler(military commander and leading member of the Nazi party), to have the town of Lidice completely destroyed as punishment for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (high ranking German Nazi official) in the spring of 1942. The Nazi had murdered all 192 men of the village of Lidice. At first they took them out in pairs of two blind folded to shoot them, decided it was to slow, he 5, then 10, then 15 at a time without a blindfold. They shot them twice to the heart and once to the head. The women, were sent to concentration camps where many of them died there from lack of hygiene, epidemics and contagious diseases. The children were separated from their mothers of the town were sent to work in textile factories where the children were only bringing what they were wearing. The care was minimal, they were not fed sufficiently. The children slept on plain floors and covered themselves with coats if they had any brought from home. They suffered from a lack of hygiene and from illnesses. In the memorial set up on site they showed letters that the children had written to their relatives asking if they could spare the bread crumbs from the table or for a pair of shoes. The memorial didn't allow us to take pictures in the actual museum. At the end they showed videos of some of the children that had survived and they recapped on their stories. I was mad that I didn't get to see the whole thing since it was the most interesting part. Then we went outside to walk around where the village was actually located. It was really cold and miserable outside. It would have been far more enjoyable in the spring. Here are some photos:

where the village of Lidice was

first house of the village

memorial of the children from Lidice

where the shooting of 192 men took place

the burnt down town of Lidice

where the school was located

Then we went into the town of Litomerice for lunch. The town was a former royal town and the cutural center of the Sudeten German community. We didn't get much time for exploring since we found a place to eat. By far had some of the worst service of my life. So we get there and sit at a table we are sitting there trying to translate the menu since it's in Czech. The waitress comes up to us realized we didn't know Czech so asked if we wanted an English menu and we said yes. So she comes back 15 minutes later to take our drink order and we decide to practice our Czech so I ask for a hot chocolate. So 30 minutes pass and we flagged down our waitress and she is like 5 minutes. We're like what?? We just want to order. So we wait another 15 minutes pass and we're starving. We flag her down a second time and she finally takes our order. I order a pasta in a cheese sauce with chicken. It doesn't take long to get us our food. My food was really rich and salty yuck! It was also all the same blah whitish color too. My roommate thought she had ordered chicken it was really a sausage wrapped around pork around chicken it was weird and my other roommate got guloush which was probably the best meal out of the three. So we finish eating and we wait around for another 15 minutes till we can finally pay. Since we spend the entire time in the restaurant we didn't get to explore. So we hoped back on the bus. Here are some photos from around Litomerice:

We took the bus to Terezín the former Jewish Ghetto. Terezín was one places that they held the Jews before they sent them to the Concentration Camps (most likely Auschwitz). More than 150,000 Jews were sent to Terezín, and although it was not an extermination camp about 33,000 died in the ghetto itself, mostly from the appalling conditions arising out of extreme population density. They had housed people in a building which was only able to hold about 3,000 people. The had to set up a crematorium on site from the number of deaths at Terezín. We got to view the crematorium but we were not allowed to take photos. The people working in the crematorium were Jews and they made sure to keep the ashes of each of the different people cremated so they could have a proper memorial. We also viewed the remaining railroad tracks of the deportation station. Then we saw the Hidden Synagogue which was not destroyed.

outside the crematorium

Railroad tracks to deportation station

the small hidden synagogue

Writing on the wall, partly damaged from flood

ceiling

mezuzah on the entrance way to the synagogue

Then we went to the Small Fortress Terezín and had a guided tour through the Gestapo prison. They showed us the living conditions and horrors of the prison. We were able to take tons of photos so I will explain through photos.