Prague, April 23 (CTK) – A procession of about 300 people carrying Israeli flags walked through the old Jewish quarter of the city and then gathered in the Wallenstein Garden, which is part of the Senate, to mark Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Day, today.
Israeli Ambassador Daniel Meron, who opened the commemorative event, spoke of a steep increase in attacks against Jews in Europe and North America in 2016, calling it the worst year since the Nazi era.
Mojmir Kallus, head of the organising International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) group, said the Holocausts needs to be remembered because of these more frequent attacks.
Holocaust survivors Evelina Merova and Judith Rosenzweig were among those who took part in the event, which was held for the 14th time this year.
Merova and Rosenzweig both had to go to the Terezin ghetto during the Nazi occupation of the country and they were among 60 Jewish girls who lived in room number 28. Their life stories and memoirs were presented in a book by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick (Die Madchen von Zimmer 28, 2004), which was published in several languages.
Fifteen of the 60 girls from room 28, all born in 1930, survived the war.
Rosenzweig got to Israel in 1948 and she has been living in Haifa. From the Oswiecim concentration camp, Merova got to the Soviet Union where she was adopted by a family of a doctor. She returned to her homeland, Czechoslovakia, in 1960.
“We have a rather different view of the world. We have a different values scale. The laments and disputes sometimes seem petty to us because we realised that life is about something else,” Merova said.
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