Prague: Wenceslas Square and the Old Jewish Cemetery

After a week in Germany—a week of camps and memorials and the persistent, physical weight of the 20th century—Prague felt like a city that exhaled. It was golden in the late afternoon light of early summer, crowded with tourists and students and street musicians, and it was astonishingly beautiful in a way that no German city I had seen was beautiful. Most German cities of any size were rebuilt after the war. Prague was not bombed. It survived. The Old Town and the Jewish Quarter and the castle district are genuinely old, not reconstructions, and the difference is legible in the stone.

It was also, I would quickly learn, a city with its own history of occupation and loss. Czechoslovakia was occupied by Germany from 1939 to 1945, then by the Soviet Union’s political orbit for forty years after that. The Velvet Revolution had happened in 1989 on the very boulevard I was walking. Prague was not carrying the weight of perpetration the way Germany was, but it was carrying its own weight, and the Jewish Quarter was part of it.

Wenceslas Square

Wenceslas Square is not, technically, a square. It is a wide boulevard sloping uphill for about 750 meters from the bottom of the New Town to the National Museum at the top—a neoclassical building that closes the perspective like a backdrop. The buildings lining it are Art Nouveau and Neo-Renaissance, elaborate facades with decorated cornices and bay windows. Yellow taxis idled at the curb. Tourists photographed everything. The architecture was ornate in a way that German cities generally aren’t, because Prague was built by Habsburg emperors who wanted grandeur rather than by the postwar reconstruction funds that shaped so much of Germany.

This boulevard was the center of the Velvet Revolution in November 1989—the point where hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where Václav Havel spoke, where the communist government realized it was over. The bronze statue of Saint Wenceslas on horseback at the top of the square had been a gathering point for that crowd. It was also the site of Jan Palach’s 1969 self-immolation in protest of the Soviet invasion. The boulevard carries a lot of history in its ornate facades.

At night, the city became something else again. Baroque statues glowed under streetlights. The stone saints on the Charles Bridge—thirty of them, ten per side, installed in the 17th and 18th centuries—cast long shadows across the water. I wandered with my camera and no particular plan, which is the right way to experience any city for the first time: without an agenda, following what catches your eye, staying out until you are too tired to stay out anymore.

The Old Jewish Cemetery

The next day: Josefov, Prague’s Jewish Quarter. The district was named for Emperor Joseph II, who issued the Edict of Toleration in 1782, giving Jews in the Habsburg Empire significantly expanded rights—including the right to settle outside the designated Jewish Quarter for the first time. Before the edict, Prague’s Jewish population was confined to the Quarter. The Old Jewish Cemetery is what that confinement, over three and a half centuries, produced.

From the mid-15th century until 1787, this small plot of land—roughly the size of a large city block—was the only place Prague’s Jewish community was permitted to bury their dead. As the cemetery filled, the community could not expand outward; the surrounding land was not available to them. So they added soil and buried new graves on top of the old ones, layer upon layer, over more than three hundred years. Historians estimate there are between eight and twelve layers of burials, amounting to perhaps 100,000 individuals or more buried in a space designed for a fraction of that number. The visible surface today shows approximately 12,000 gravestones, many tilted at sharp angles and pressing against each other because the ground beneath them has been heaved upward by successive burials over centuries.

I stood there for a long time. The cemetery is simultaneously beautiful and difficult to be inside of. It is a record of Jewish life in Prague across seven centuries—rabbis and scholars and merchants and their families—and it is also a record of the conditions under which that life was lived. The community could only bury their dead here because they were not permitted to bury them anywhere else. The density of the cemetery is a direct consequence of the restrictions that governed Jewish life in Prague across those centuries. It is a monument to persistence, and also to the pressure that made persistence necessary.

The Holocaust did not create antisemitism. It was the culmination of a pattern of exclusion, restriction, and targeted violence that ran through European Jewish history for centuries. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is a marker of that longer history. The gravestones were already there when the Nazis arrived. The community that kept the cemetery had survived far longer than the Nazis could imagine surviving. That the community in Prague was nearly exterminated between 1941 and 1945 is part of the story. That the gravestones are still standing is also part of the story.