The Memorial of Silence was created to awaken places of memory associated with the wartime deportations of Jews from occupied Prague.
At the center of this project is the area around Bubny railway station, where the founders of the non-profit organization installed Aleš Veselý’s The Gate of Infinity in 2015. This sculpture reminiscent of Jacob’s Ladder was envisioned as forming the cornerstone of the station building’s renovation and its conversion into an active memorial commemorating important dates and remembering the stories and lives that have left their imprint on the ground around the sculpture, which rises over the path followed by the 50,000 Prague citizens deported to ghettos and concentration camps.
At the start of the project’s twelve-year development process, a synopsis of the future permanent exhibition was drawn up, focused on the grand meaning of the site’s legacy. Besides the story of the deportations itself, this includes the roots of evil inherent to the Nazis’ racial politics, the transformation of Prague’s cultural identity after the demise of the city’s cultural “trialogue,” the search for a language by which we might comprehend the stories of survivors, and awakening an interest in the legacy of wartime stories among future generations.
The Memorial of Silence’s creative team developed a public outreach strategy and established a series of educational programs presented by the public benefit corporation and, subsequently, by the state-funded organization that we established and onto which we confidently transferred the fruits of our eight years of preparations for the station building’s revitalization.
Once the project had been entrusted to the newly created state-funded organization, the institution, established with the goal of working with the stories of the twentieth century, saw its own story play out: a story of an experiment with state administration and its limitations when it comes to developing cultural projects, and a story of the fundamental impossibility of developing a culture of memory with state support. The constraints on creativity in developing a functioning project with a cultural impact eventually culminated in the replacement of the organization’s director in 2024 and the subsequent dissolution of the established creative team.
This political decision diminished the project’s originally envisioned content and meaning, leaving the project for the station’s redevelopment devoid of deeper meaning. As a result, the state lost access to the unique collections and exhibitions on which the memorial’s educational programs and future exhibition plans had been based. The organization’s founders have returned to the original non-profit organization and intend to continue to develop, as much as possible, the programs and events they have been organizing on the site of the memory since the very beginning.
The name “Memorial of Silence”
The public benefit corporation was founded in 2012 under the name Shoah Memorial Prague. As work on the project progressed, however, we felt the need for the organization’s name to signal that the content of its programs was intended for a wider audience than just those interested in the stories of the Holocaust.
In 2015, we began our tradition of Drumming for Bubny, an annual commemoration of the first transport to leave Prague on 16 October 1941. The purpose of this regular autumn gathering for hundreds of participants in a mega-orchestra of drums is to disrupt the passivity of the silent majority – past, present, and future – who are complicit in events that should never happen.
This message about people who passively looked on as the Holocaust happened under their noses, combined with the fact that Prague lacked an active Holocaust memorial even seventy years after the war, led us to call our project the Memorial of Silence. In 2020, the government approved the establishment of a new state-funded organization to take over the original content and programming of the Shoah Memorial Prague. With this, the project’s name and the organization tasked with its development were joined in one.
After the organization’s director was replaced as the result of a never fully explained political decision, a new strategy was chosen in a tender involving just one candidate, and shortly after a new board took office the state organization was given a new name. At the same time, however, the original founders of the plan to transform this place of memory are determined to continue with their program and vision, which they feel is worthwhile and needed. For this reason, they have returned to their original project name, and the Memorial of Silence now encompasses the new organization’s collections, its dominant feature (Aleš Veselý’s sculpture), and above all the program and vision contained in the three-volume catalogue Expedition Bubny.