Day Forty-one, in Which the Háje Paneláky Are Visited

About sixty years ago, the Czechoslovak government's urban planners came together in what I imagine to be a cacophonous goulash of adderall and ideology and produced the sort of idea that normally comes from, well, communist urban planners. This idea was to make as many citizens as humanly possible live in as few structures as possible. For, you know, solidarity. This led to the panelák, a dense, concrete monolith teeming with inhabitants crammed between its paper-thin walls. Built in monotonous clusters, the resultant panelák communities often saw tens of thousands of people living on one block. One of the most notorious panelák communities is Háje, an insular grouping of paneláky clinging to the gaunt outskirts of Prague. It lies at the very end of Prague's longest metro line, which is where I, unassumingly dressed, disembarked earlier today.

For your spatial frame of reference:

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Ascending from the metro, I found myself in a courtyard bound by a thousand balconies. Paneláky rose on all sides. Defeated-looking grass clung to life among patches of brown snow and black dirt. Cigarette butts populated the ground at a rate of thirty per square meter--assuming a courtyard of 40x55m and accurate observation on my part, 66,000 in this courtyard alone.

At first, I was a shade underwhelmed. However, as each monstrous panelák I passed dutifully revealed another concrete expanse behind it, I began to feel the true enormity of this place. I wandered aimlessly through a world punctuated at every instance by concreted towers ripe with humanity: catenary clotheslines sagging with tablecloths, paisley skirts, and children's stained denim; cockeyed satellite dishes supported by erector-set construction; lawn chars perched on cinder blocks and mattresses; chainsmokers nestled in 14th-story roosts; soccer balls, shriveled and cracked. These human obelisks extended in every direction, a raw sprawl.

As I ambled through this endlessly drab but indisputably alive world, a rising sense of unreality took me. I began to internalize the unbending repetition, mechanically taking photographs and jotting notes. I don't know how long I meandered; time became gossamer and slick, slipped its clothespins.

Though I had arrived in mid-afternoon, I found the sun just moments from setting. Quoting from my notes at the time:

walking the grubby streets, light reflected from the windows is unexpectedly sandia [watermelon-colored]. when did the sun start setting? I'm seized by the irrational presentiment that when darkness falls here, the exits close and this bubble becomes isolated not only geographically, but breaks loose temporally. the inexplicable sensation of being trapped here when night falls, stuck in an anachronistic communist dream forever.

As I wound an uncertain way back through dusky streets, my feeling of unreality began to distill into something new. At first, I couldn't qualify the resultant feeling. Eventually, however, I was able to put it on paper:

here is the place in which the 20th-cent. fascination with modernity has been refined and brought to bear, poured into this place like a leaden glaze. everything drips with it, slick and sodden.
I have never felt more anonymous.

Day Thirty-four, in Which the Narrator Travels to the Sudetenland

Earlier today, I found myself in the windswept northwest reaches of the Czech Republic, near the Czech-German border. I was visiting the town of Terezín and what is left of Lidice, which can no longer be called a town. Both are located in the Sudetenland, a patchwork of border regions that hem the edges of the Czech Republic. They are stitched together by the sinewy thread of a shared ethnic German population. In the lead-up to WWII, the Sudetenland was infamously ceded to Nazi Germany by Neville Chamberlain & Co. in an effete attempt to forestall Hitler's towering barbarity. After the war, a majority of the ethnic Germans living there were expelled by the Czechs as a reprisal for the crimes of the Nazis. To this day, debate lingers among historian's swarthy minds as to whether or not this was an... overreaction. (Around a million Germans died as a result of post-WWII reprisals across Europe.)

Lidice, once a thriving, provincial hamlet, no longer exists. This is where it used to be:

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After two Czech paratroopers assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, an apoplectic Hitler carried off several responses of increasing lunacy. Fairly far along this arc of madness lies the erasure of Lidice. On June 10, 1942, German soldiers entered the town and shot, in groups of ten, every man over the age of 15. The women and children were shipped to concentration camps where nearly all of them died. Three Lidice families who happened to be out of town that day were tracked down and shot, and every structure in the town was blown out of the ground. Even the cemetery was dug up and bulldozed; the town in its entirety was physically eradicated. Today, a statue of the children of Lidice (nearly all of whom were gassed upon their arrival at Chelmno extermination camp) looks over a field that contains nothing but snow and a few stone monuments.


After Lidice, I traveled further northwest, to Terezín. This is where Terezín is:

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Originally built in the 18th century as a military fortress by the Hapsburg Monarchy, Terezín was emptied of its original inhabitants in 1940 and converted into a Jewish ghetto. Its natural defenses were inverted for the purposes of keeping people in, and the town, formerly of 4,000 inhabitants, swelled with the weight of over 70,000. Terezín served as a major point of amalgamation for the Jewry of Eastern Europe. It was thousands' final checkpoint before Auschwitz. The consolidation, with Terezín as the locus:
Fed by so many bleak tributaries, Terezín's misery became denser and denser, finally collapsing into a singularity of desolation. The inhabitants of the ghetto were crammed into attics and cellars, given next to no food, made to work 18 hours a day in freezing conditions, and beaten mercilessly. After only a few days, a majority of the population became severely diarrhetic. Next to no latrines or hygienic facilities were available in the ghetto, which soon became miry with waste and death.

During the first few days, death rates were low enough that bodies could still be buried, and funerals performed. However, as death rates climbed exponentially (literally), this quickly became impossible. The Nazis began work on a four-oven crematorium, which was completed in the fall of 1942. It ran continuously until the end of the war. Over 33,000 people died in the ghetto itself, and another 88,000 were sent to find certain death in liquidation camps to the east.

In this turbid course of events, a young girl of nascent artistic talent was separated from her father, who was placed in a different section of the ghetto. Through a fortuitous contact, she managed to smuggle a picture to him. She had drawn a snowman. On the back, she had written that she loved him. A few days later, the drawing was smuggled back to her. Her father had written that he loved her and that she ought not to draw snowmen. Instead, he had written: draw what you see. So, she drew one of the jagged, raw scenes so common in the ghetto and smuggled it to her father. It was returned to her blank, along the news that he had been put on a train car to Auschwitz a few days prior. His last words to her had been "draw what you see." So, she did. From then until the end of the war, she drew hundreds of bleak, realistic, and indelibly beautiful pictures of everyday life in the ghetto. Today, this body of work paints perhaps the most vibrant portrait of the Terezín ghetto we have:

While she drew away the years, a teacher on the other side of the ghetto led his gaunt students to a large, stately willow tree near the crematorium. He told them that after WWI, it had taken over five years for the members of his family to reunite with one another, scattered as they were by the war. He made his charges promise that when this had ended, they would return to the willow and find one another. Those who survived kept that promise, and today the scarred trunk of the Meeting Tree still stands in Terezín, just behind the crematorium, where it is visited by the descendants of those who reunited beneath its arched branches.

Terezín was liberated May 9, 1945, by the Soviet Army. Today, it is once again a small town of about 3,100 inhabitants.

Day Seventeen, in Which Wagner's Heart Breaks

"Hey, Honza."
"What?"
"Can you translate something into German for me?"
"What?"
"'You're breaking my heart, Max.' It's for a comic I'm drawing about Max Weber and Richard Wagner."
"What?"
"It's sort of a star-crossed lovers thing."
"What?"

Four minutes earlier:

I have come to believe that the clubs, pubs, and schlubs of Prague convene in a terribly muculent cellar nestled somewhere in the uncountable twists of the Prague underground in order to gather the most absurd collection of music possible and canonize it as The Prague Playlist. The List seems to largely be ruled by a tenuous coalition government between Lady Gaga, tearful raver-dropouts, and the song Infinity.

At this juncture, you should probably listen this song on YouTube or something.

It is more the less the aural fluid in which all other sonic experiences are suspended. However, I have this weird tic that comes from reading about two thousand pages more Weber than anyone should. I hear the song's ubiquitous lyric 'infinity' as 'modernity.' I don't know what's wrong with me either. This makes me picture Max Weber (stage name: Darth Weber) pursuing a career in the production of club music. This also makes me picture the illustrious German composer Richard Wagner being almost as bothered by this as he was by Jewish people. Also, I imagine Weber and Wagner palling around in Germany, not inviting Nietzsche to hang out with them at the opera and stuff. So, I sketched a little 3-panel bit before I got bored of the idea: