Prague is a beautiful city, home of intellectual and artistic giants like Franz Kafka and Alfonse Mucha, and beloved of Mozart. But behind the elegant beauty of Prague lie dark shadows to remind us of the fearsome intolerance of which supposedly-civilized humans are still capable. In the old Jewish quarter in the heart of present-day Prague stands the Pinkas Synagogue, built in 1535 and in peaceful daily use thereafter for almost 400 years, closed by the Nazis when they invaded Prague and kept closed by the Communist reign that followed the war. On its walls today are inscribed the names of almost 80,000 Prague Jews who were deported to Nazi concentration camps and never returned, some 10,000 of them children. It is a profoundly moving experience to walk through this building, reading the names and looking at the pictures that the children drew as they awaited deportation and death.
We ought never to forget that this Nazi atrocity was committed by a modern, Western, democratically elected government (yes, Hitler was lawfully elected by his constituents), operating within the legal framework in place at the time, justified by a “scientific” racial theory and a coherent official foreign policy, and with the full support of a great many people both within his nation and outside of it. If we think it can’t happen again, we are deluding ourselves. If we think it could never happen in America, we are deluding ourselves. Intolerance, irrationality, oppression and violence are endemic in human cultures, and are kept at bay only by ceaseless vigilance. We forget that lesson at our peril.
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