Prague Revisited by ACC Art Books

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Foreword 13

July 1944 - April 1945 A Child’s time in prague and a last-minute escape 14

Spring 1985

Two 40th Anniversaries 23

Summer 1988 near the end of Communist rule 61

Imagine John The John Lennon Wall 131

Spring 1990 freedom Restored 149

New Year’s Eve 1991 The end of the Soviet Empire 213

233

July 1944 - April 1945

A child’s time in Prague and A last-minute escape

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Old City Hall viewed from Charles Bridge. All photos in this chapter by Ilse von zur Muehlen.

Peter’s Account

During the summer of 1944, my younger brother Joachim and I arrived in Prague by train. Our father, Gerhard, an orthopedic surgeon in the military, had taken us from Poland to be with our mother Ilse and little sister Iris. Four years earlier, following a midnight arrest at his apartment in Berlin, he had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht, which needed medical staff for the war effort. He had recently been promoted to the rank of captain and was attached to Panzer Division 5 operating in Poland. This was to be his last furlough before his death a month later. My mother had chosen Prague because it was beautiful and seemed safe, so far having been spared the ravages of World War II. For the preceding few months, Joachim and I had been living on a secluded estate in the no-longer-safe Polish countryside threatened by Soviet forces pressing westward. Berlin, our home town, was already in ruins, as was our bombed-out apartment. The Polish estate had been given to our grandfather, an expert agrarian, who nevertheless insisted on paying for it, in exchange for one taken from him in Latvia as part of the infamous swap of territory in the 1938 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Years earlier, on March 15, 1939, five days after I was born, Hitler’s Wehrmacht had marched into Prague without opposition. Czechoslovakia had become the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” The occupation was to last six years, to the end of the war. During that period, tens of thousands of intellectuals, artists, politicians, and gypsies were murdered; and of the 90,000 Jews who had stayed after the invasion, only 10,000 survived. The nearby Terezín concentration camp—turned into a Potemkin village for foreign inspection—became a holding pen for prisoners destined for the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Dachau, Oranienberg, Ravensbrück, and Treblinka. In 1941, Hitler appointed the diabolical Reinhard Heydrich, deputy to SS leader Heinrich Himmler and architect of the Holocaust, to be “Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.” The following January, mass deportations of Jews having proved infeasible, Heydrich was to chair the Wannsee Conference, which formalized plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”—the genocide of Jews in German-occupied Europe. By means of wholesale executions and with the help of SS-Gruppenührer and Secretary of St.ate of the Reich Protectorate

of Bohemia and Moravia, Karl Hermann Frank, Heydrich launched a reign of terror arreSt.ing and killing opponents and ramping up the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. In June of 1942, Heydrich was assassinated by Czech resiSt.ance fighters who had parachuted from a British Royal Air Force plane. In response, the SS killed them and another 120 members of the Czech resiSt.ance. Seven of the paratroopers had hidden in the crypt of the Orthodox St Cyril and Methodius Church near the Vltava River. When the Gestapo tried to flush them out by flooding the crypt, the men committed suicide. The cathedral’s clergymen and several laypeople were arrested for collaboration and executed. The Nazis then closed all Orthodox churches in Czechoslovakia. Today, the crypt is the “National Memorial to the Victims of the Heydrich Terror.”

As further revenge, the Nazis executed 1,331 Czech citizens. They immediately put to death 152 Jews. The SS also accelerated the shipment of 3,000 others from Terezín to Auschwitz for extermination. Then, upon Hitler’s request to set an example, Karl Hermann Frank ordered the destruction the villages of Lidice and Ležáky, not far from Prague. Truckloads of German security police under the command of Captain Max Rostock shot all the men, rounded up the women to be taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and collected 90 children. After examinations by Himmler’s “racial experts,” children deemed “suitable” were sent off to Germany to be raised as proper Aryans. Most were gassed at the Chelmno extermination camp.

Our little house in Prague 13 to the west of Old Town was comfortable, though it lacked heat. In our family album, a faded snapshot showed three children cavorting naked in a tin tub under the spray of a garden hose held by Polish nanny Irma. From this house, one could catch glimpses of the Castle and see hazy outlines of the many church spires.

With war raging all over Europe, the peace and quiet of our existence was, of course, an illusion. My family was part of an occupying force, and while native Czechs were outwardly friendly, they must have resented or even hated us. Near the end of our stay, my mother learned from the nanny, who had good relations with our Czech neighbors, that the house had previously belonged to a Jewish family that had

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Bus stop, Pankrác

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Bus stop, Pankrác

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Pinkas Synagogue

And on the roof the ancient tiles that have collapsed across and on top of each other (the original pattern erased by earth’s rotation through the years) remind me of something . . . I was there . . . wait: it’s the old Jewish graveyard in Prague where the dead live closer together than they did in life, the stones jammed tight tight together.

So much love encircled! The roof tiles with lichen-script in an unknown tongue are the stones in the ghetto graveyard of the archipelago folk, stones erected and toppled over

The hovel shines

Wth the light of all those carried by a certain wave, by a certain wind Out here to their destinies.

Baltics, Tomas Tranströmer

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Klausen Synagogue

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Saints Barbara, Margaret, and Elizabeth on Charles Bridge

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Pietá on Charles Bridge

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St. Nicholas Cathedral, Malá Strana

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Lennon Shrine, 1992

Imagine John

The John Lennon Wall

1985 and 1992

The images in this section, taken in 1985 and 1990, depict the “John Lennon Wall” belonging to the Knights of Malta located on the Maltese Square, or Maltézské Náměstí, in Malá Strana, just past Charles Bridge. The wall, situated across the French Embassy, began its life as an underground community board in the early seventies with love poems and short messages against the regime. It received its first decoration dedicated to John Lennon, symbol of Western culture and freedom, after his assassination in December 1980, when an unknown artist painted an image of Lennon and some lyrics. In 1985, parts of the wall were sparsely covered with stick-figure drawings, antiwar messages, and crude graffiti paying homage to Lennon and the Beatles. By 1990, the wall had become a shrine. At one end, below a large painting of the Beatle Saint, we find offerings of cookies, scraps of photos, and even cigarettes. The rainbow-colored arch enveloping Lennon’s face, whose dark and light halves suggest the Yin/Yang symbol, evoke the image of a shrine to Ganesh in Kathmandu—once the gathering spot for hippies of the psychedelic sixties.

Dominating the wall is a giant portrait of Lennon’s face, captioned by the legend,

ALL WE ARE SAYING IS ….

As with all graffiti, the wall’s enduring quality is impermanence. During Communism, the authorities took the wall for what it was: a forum for public dissent that needed to be cleansed, only to find new messages soon after. Since the Velvet Revolution, the wall has undergone perpetual change, once even being completely whitewashed. In 2020, one painting of John will depict him wearing a face mask, printed with the words: