Prague, Oct 14 (CTK) – The design of a memorial to mark the wartime Jewish transports from Prague’s former Bubny railway station will be put on display in the nearby Chemistry Gallery in Prague-Holesovice on October 16-17, Pavel Stingl has told CTK on behalf of the Shoah Memorial group, the project’s organiser.
The group wants the Memorial of Silence in the reconstructed station hall, designed by the ARN studio, to be a site for people to discuss history, and also a contribution to modern Prague architecture.
The exhibition will present the basic concept of the future permanent installation, Stingl said.
It will open on the anniversary of the first Jewish transport that left Prague in 1941.
Simultaneously, the annual Bubnovani pro bubny drumming event will start at the long-defunct and abandoned station of Bubny [which is the Czech word for drums] at 17:00 to commemorate the wartime transports.
The costs of the station’s planned rebuilding into a memorial are estimated at 125 million crowns.
Stingl said the project has been supported by the Culture Ministry and newly also the Prague City Hall. The reconstruction is scheduled for the second half of 2018 and the organisers plan to open the memorial six months after the start of the reconstruction works, he said.
The ARN studio of architect Jiri Krejcik, which won a contest for the memorial, said its deign derives from the moment of lethargic silence that spread over Prague in the period of Jewish transports.
“This silence is no silence of a forest or meadows, but the silence of fear, apathy and indifference, embodied by the [memorial’s] stony immobility. The object stands here and keeps silent,” the ARN studio wrote.
The 12-metre high space of the building’s entrance hall will be filled with a large number of books made of concrete, forming an abstract commemorative library with an atmosphere of a temple wall, and with sun beams illuminating it to emphasise the structure and diversity of the books that remind of 50,000 life stories, ARN said.
The Shoah Memorial says Prague is among the few European capitals to have no Holocaust victims memorial in a public area.
