Each year millions of visitors walk through the cobbled streets of Prague’s Old Town – without realising, most likely, that many of the stones below their feet have been looted from what was meant to be sacred ground. The BBC’s Rob Cameron only recently learned their secret.
The BBC writes:
We stood, blocking the pedestrian traffic, on one of the busiest streets in the Czech capital. A steady stream of people pushed by us muttering as they clutched bags of Christmas shopping and souvenirs and we peered at the ground. In the distance, at the bottom of Wenceslas Square, crowds congregated around street performers and kiosks selling sausages and beer.
‘There,’ said Leo Pavlat, the owlish, bearded director of the Prague Jewish Museum, pointing at a thin strip of dark, square cobblestones at our feet. ‘There! You see? All along there.’ He looked up, his eyes following the strip as it ran along the short pedestrianised street. He delved into a plastic bag and brought out two cobblestones. They were almost identical to those embedded in the ground below us…
One bore fragments of a date, 1895. The other featured three letters of the Hebrew alphabet – he, vav, bet, the gold paint which lined the chiselled inscriptions glinting in the winter sun. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked. ‘Is it part of a name?’ Leo frowned. ‘No idea. It’s not enough to tell. Possibly it’s part of a eulogy.’
Leo Pavlat has owned these stones for more than 30 years…
… Even attending the officially-sanctioned weekly service in one of the few functioning synagogues was enough to prompt a chat with the secret police, he said. ‘There were no publications, no education. I think the regime just wanted the Jewish community to slowly die.’
… He’d like the city to put up a small plaque. A plaque that would remind people, he said, of the once vibrant Jewish life here…
