2023 PLU World Music Centers: Pupils Peruse Prague

I don’t remember much about Prague but I do feel that so far it was my favorite city. Day one, when we had just gotten off the train to start heading to our hostel, we ran into a situation. I’m sure there are many perspectives from this moment in the other blogs but I will share mine anyway. When we first arrived, Powell gave us our bus passes right away. When you get a bus pass you have to validate it on the bus as soon as possible. When we got on the bus to go to our hostel, we had large backpacks on that took up a lot of space and the bus was very crowded before we got on. Two students were unable to validate their passes given that they had large heavy bags on, we had just arrived, the bus was crowded, and a host of reasonable reasons to be unable to validate a pass. Within about a minute of us being on the bus, a man walked up to us to check our tickets and realized that the two students had not validated their passes. These students could have easily been told this and slipped their tickets into the validation machine, which takes two seconds at most, but the official did not let them and kicked them off at the next stop. We all got off the bus with these students and things only went further south after that. The official spoke almost no English and requested that the two students pay 1000 Czech Koruna each. People became upset, the police were mentioned several times but never called, and we had trouble telling if we were actually required to pay this fee or if this was all just a scam but it was a stressful situation for everyone given the fact that we had literally just arrived in Prague. It wasn’t until Powell (who had taken the other half of our group on a later bus given how crowded the first bus was) that things really started to heat up. Tones were raised but no large issues were caused. Eventually, the guy lowered the fee to be 1000 crowns for the two students combined which ended up only costing about $45 US dollars. After that everyone was pretty done with the day and either got dinner or went to bed right away.

We eventually arrived at the hostel. The rooms of the hostel were small and raked about second to last place in terms of the comfort of all the hostels. The shower was amazing though and had an excellent density of water.

Bus stop near our hostel

Terizin was a day I hope to never forget. It started with the drive there which was incredibly interesting on its own. Our tour guide had a thick Czech accent and deep gravelly voice as well as an inflection that made everything he said carry a deeper weight. Whenever he told a story it wasn’t hard to focus which I sometimes found was the case with the tour guides. He started by telling us about how Czech came to fall under Nazi control and how a Nazi general called “Heinrich” was able to help create the final solution. He also talked about the resilience of Czech students during the war and how they would sabotage weapons and other equipment used by the Germans. He then went on to tell us about how Heinrich had been assassinated. This led to a search for the assassins that was filled with the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. Once we arrived at Terizin I began to feel a haunting weight on my shoulders. You learn about the Holocaust in school and see pictures of concentration camps all the time. Still, it’s a different level of understanding once you step out of the bus in a place where it actually happened and think “this is where people were tortured and murdered for years and I am standing in the middle of it.” The entire tour was filled with stories of horrible things humans did to each other as well as the resilience of the Jewish people during their time there. When we were in the main town the thing that stood out most to me was how people were able to keep their humanity. It’s easy to go there and see only how they were tortured but you can also see them continue to use their skills and hold onto their humanity. I could write a book about everything I saw there but I’ll end the Terizin summary by talking about the prison area of the camp. There we sat in small rooms where Jews were forced to sleep in the cold, in pitch-black rooms crammed together with feces piled up in corners and dead bodies all over the place. We sat in rooms where women had to listen to the sounds of their children getting rapped and where people went crazy from isolation rooms. In that courtyard of the prison, as the group went on to learn about the next horrible atrocities that happened in the next room, I picked up a rock.

Room where prisoners slept

Arch says "work will set you free"

Bus ride to Terizin

I must stop briefly here to talk about my unintentional rock collection. In Berlin and most of Europe, the streets and sidewalks are made of cobblestone. When I was in Berlin I saw that there were small loose pieces of cobblestone that were sitting on the sidewalk. I saw one and thought that it might make a good souvenir so I picked it up. Then in Leipzig, we went to the church where Bach worked and performed most of his life. Again there were some small loose pieces of cobblestone attached to the church and I grabbed one. Since then I have been grabbing a stone from every city I visit. However, the one I found in Terizin carried a different weight with it than the others.

It was not a very large rock only about 2 inches tall and kind of skinny. When the tour came to an end and I walked out of that area of the camp, I wondered if I should keep this rock. It had probably been touched by the shoes of people who had committed some of the most inhumane acts imaginable and the feet of prisoners forced to strip naked and face the furry of a rabid dog assigned only to rip them apart. Or maybe it was never there until recently. Who knows. But as I walked out of Terizin that day looking out at the thousands of graves, I decided I would hold on to this rock as a reminder of what I had learned. I clenched it tight, angry that I could not help the people I had learned about that day. Then I got on the bus and went about the rest of my day.

The rest of the time in Prague was spent exploring and going up the clock tower. The food was amazing, the tours were great and good times were had in general. I'm sorry this blog was more of a bummer than the other ones I just hope to never forget Terizin and writing about it will help me remember that day. However, most of my time there was fun. I got to try absinth, explore the markets, and many more. It is truly a time I will never forget.