“We’re standing on their shoulders”: Jewish Museum honours war-time staff
New plaques at Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery pay tribute to staff at the city’s Jewish Museum who saved countless valuable artefacts during the Holocaust. The memorial helps mark the 120th anniversary of the foundation of the museum, one of the oldest institutions of its kind in the world.
Recently installed plaques at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Josefov list scores of names of staff and associates of the city’s Jewish Museum whose work gathering items owned by Jewish families and communities during the Holocaust led to the institution having one of the largest collections of Judaica anywhere in the world. Curator Martin Jelínek describes their priceless endeavours.
“They collected more than 100,000 objects during the war. The process was that objects, usually small objects from synagogues, were sent from small villages to larger cities. Then from larger cities in the Protectorate, they were sent to Prague. And those employees were responsible for cataloguing them.”
Standing by tottering headstones in the famous cemetery, Pavla Niklová, director of the Jewish Museum, explains the timing of the new plaques.
“This year the Jewish Museum is celebrating 120 years of existence. In Judaism, people say, We wish you to live to 120 – and the museum has accomplished that. And it’s a very appropriate occasion to recognise people who worked at the museum during the war.”
Some 161 names are inscribed on the plaques. Some perished in the Holocaust, others survived and the fate of still others is unknown. Martin Jelínek again.
“I think more than half survived the war. They were lucky. Usually, because they were from so-called mixed marriages – their partner wasn’t a Jew – they in most cases went to Terezín in spring 1945. A smaller part of them, let’s say 40 percent of them, went in autumn 1943 to Terezín and later to Auschwitz.”
The plaques were unveiled at a ceremony in late April, as were a series of nearby stone benches bearing the names of those who have “adopted” or sponsored them. Pavla Niklová says these offer a chance for visitors to pause and reflect.
“Somebody came with the idea that we would have new benches and somebody else came with the idea that we would offer them for ‘adoption’ to relatives of people who worked here during the war or to partner institutions of the museum. Actually we were thinking that one of them would be dedicated by current museum employees. But because we received bigger demand from outside partners, in the end people from the museum supported the creation of those three plaques.”
The director of the Jewish Museum has great respect for the institution’s war-time staff, who carried out valuable work while living with intense stress.
“Of course it’s very difficult to imagine what they felt. One of the visitors for the opening was the son of Hana Volavková, who was director of the museum for 15 years [and whose name is on a plaque]. He remembers that she took him to the museum as a young boy of nine. He said that people were sad and serious and really worried – but he felt really safe here. He knew he was in an environment where nobody would hurt him. And I admire these people very much. There’s this nice English phrase: we are standing on their shoulders. That’s how I feel.”
