Today, we are ten years older, but the station building has remained almost completely unchanged.
Even so, the years of public dialogue have awakened memory. Since the erection of this Jacob’s ladder, the organizing team at the Memorial of Silence has produced hundreds of cultural events. We have established a language of dialogue, have changed the way we remember, and have created an educational plan founded on the idea of placing the past into context with the present.
In those ten years, we have also witnessed the departure of the last survivors, whom we tried to honor in our initial projects. The legacy of the stories of the Shoah is now definitively in the hands of the later generations. This heritage can be a stigma, but it is better to talk about all burdens and heaviness.
It’s Never Too Late for Dialogue.
The Memorial of Silence marks the tenth anniversary of its search for grand stories by presenting a new dialogue with those who left us along the path now straddled by the Gate of Infinity. It is a dialogue that will hint at or finish things that could not be said because fate prevented its participants from meeting. Let us write to our grandfathers, grandmothers, or a hero whom we respect, and tell them what their story means to us, how it guides us in our lives, and how we can use it to enrich our children’s lives as well. Let us write a letter across time and share it with those who know little how memory can both empower and hurt us and how dialogue can heal and help.
Everyone who embarks on this courageous journey will do something for themselves and for others.
Those who share their text with others will form a link in a chain of dialogue that will one day accompany the musical memory of all those who did not return…
One day, perhaps, we will turn these pages into a new family album of stories. It is the album of a family linked by fate, a family linked by the Gate of Infinity and by a dialogue across our shared memory or its parable.
Everyone can decide on their own whether to share their letter, whether to sign it, and whether to include the addressee in the header.
info@pamatnikticha.cz
…for those whom we didn’t meet
Dear Grandpa Josef,
Fate is not interested in anniversaries, for it uses a different clock than we do here on earth, but I believe that at this time, eighty years since the end of that terrible – for you, horrible – war, a fissure will appear in space-time through which my gratitude might reach you…
…my gratitude for your existence, and that Grandma Vilma could share with you all the experiences you managed to accumulate during the time of Masaryk… my gratitude that you raised your girls, who – despite what they went through – lived to a ripe old age. The older one joined you recently at the blessed age of 97. My mother still thinks of you often in the house that you provided for your daughters. We love you and we named our smallest child after you. She is an excellent painter and skier – and, unlike me, a good learner as well.
After your departure, down the wrong side of the ramp at Auschwitz, things were never the way they were before the war. Thirty-six of our family disappeared, and those who remained never returned to your slow lifestyle and your culture so naturally spread out across all of Europe.Memories of the war were long a taboo in our home.
When people finally started to talk about your journey, it was a time of memorial fields, where we with our empty graves felt like a grain of sand amidst a mad statistic. Nobody ever asked about your cultural dimension. I don’t know what voice you sang your opera arias in. I don’t know what besides Goethe and Schiller you read in the German original… I only know the legend that the classics were your argument for changing your decision to emigrate at the last moment. You believed that the Germans were a cultured nation, and that the camps about which you had heard would not come our way…