Prague, Oct 11 (CTK) – Prague’s long-unused Bubny railway station will be transformed into a Memorial of Silence, a centre of Holocaust remembrance that is to open in the autumn of 2018, the Year of European Cultural Heritage, the author of the project, Pavel Stingl, told CTK yesterday.
Thousands of Prague Jews were deported to concentration camps from the Bubny station during WWII.
Stingl, a documentary film maker and head of the Shoah Memorial Prague organisation, said the project has finally received all required permits from authorities and the Culture Ministry is ready to support it financially.
The costs of the station’s transformation, the installation of a permanent exhibition and the launch of an educational programme will cost 125 million crowns, Stingl said.
The memorial will be built mainly because Prague is among the few European cities which do not have any public site in remembrance of the Holocaust victims.
“We have a dignified monument to the deceased who did not return from the [Jewish] transports, which are their names [engraved] in the wall of the Pinkas Synagogue. However, Prague lacks a centre for people to discuss these issues,” Stingl said previously.
Last year, a monument by sculptor Ales Vesely was installed at the abandoned Bubny station in commemoration of the wartime transports.
In the past few years, the site hosted theatre and music performances and exhibitions highlighting the prepared Memorial of Silence project.
An exhibition of photos showing the present appearance of the Jewish transports’ places of destination was opened yesterday.
On Sunday, October 16, the 75th anniversary of the first Jewish transport dispatched from Prague, the Bubny station will host Drumming for Bubny (Bubny means “drums” in Czech), an event of beating drums in protest against the silence that can, now as well in the past, cover even the most horrible crimes, and also in remembrance of the tens of thousands of people who left the station within the transports of death.
($1=24.209 crowns)
