First Mandatory Trip

Today, all of the ECES (Eastern and Central European Studies) students had to go on one of three mandatory trips, but we got to pick which one to go on.  For the one today, I ended up going to the called "Pribram and Communist Working Camp Vojna."  To start the day off, we all met in the lobby of my dorm at 8:30 in the morning to get in our groups.  For some reason, my group was the smallest of the groups, but we headed on the bus and were on our way.  Our first stop was at the Mons Sacer Basilica Minor, also known as the Holy Mountain.  It was such a beautiful church near the town of Pribram.  We walked up the snowy mountain to get to it and it was so cold that we were all wondering if it was even worth being outside.  When we got to it, it looked almost like a castle standing out on the otherwise lifeless landscape.  As we walked up, a good number of us pulled out our cameras to take some photos of the sight.  As we got closer, the art was more intricate and more interesting, but right as I was about to take a picture of one statue beheading another one, some angry woman came over yelling about how we can't take pictures here.  At this point, we are still in the outside part of the basicalla, so I don't see any reason why I shouldn't take pictures.  There isn't any damage that a flash would do that the elements that is in wouldn't do much worse, but I figured that it was just an attempt to make us buy their postcards, which I didn't really care to do after that.  We were then told that, since we were a group of tourists and not pilgrims or locals worshiping, we would have to pay in order to enter the inside part and be led by one of their tour guides.  I think that it is outrageous to do something like that in a church, especially one that offers housing to the pilgrims that come visit.  And they didn't have a tour guide who spoke anything except Czech, so the woman guiding us around had to be a translator for the group.  It was a beautiful church inside and out.  The interesting thing to me was that the alters were made of locally mined silver.  There were also cameras set up so that, if we were interested, we could watch the service somewhere online.  I think that the link is www.svata-hora.cz for anyone who is interested in that.

As we left that, we walked down a baroque flight of stairs, which I was a little skeptical about at first.  The idea of walking down some really old stairs covered in snow while wearing my walking shoes, because I didn't know that there was snow since there's not much in Prague, just seemed like a bad idea to me.  But as we walked up, I saw this giant tunnel above the ground where we were heading.  That was the stairs.  They were covered, so there was no snow and it was a lot warmer than the freezing outside parts of the church.  That staircase seemed to go on forever, but when we got to the end, we were in the town of Pribram.

Our first stop in this town was a small, cheaply put together, museum.  I don't mean cheaply put together in a bad way, what I mean is that there was no government funding, so they were low on funds, so they did the best with the budget they had.  It was a museum of the Third Resistance.  Everything written was in Czech, with no other language translations and all the employees spoke only Czech, but that was alright because we had our translator.  She told us that the man who was going to be explaining everything for us was actually a part of the Third Resistance and would be telling us about his story in relation to the communist take-over of Czechoslovakia.  When he was 18, he fought against Hitler's army coming into the Czech lands and remembers rejoicing when Hitler's army was forced to leave the city, but he said that no one thought that, in just a few years' time, there would be another oppressive leader ruling them.  He talked about how he was one of the people who would help smuggle people out of the country through the border mountains.  One time, he was able to get in contact with some Americans, I believe, and they asked him if he could get some documents for them.  He said yes, and got them the documents successfully, but the government was able to trace the missing documents back to him.  He refused to give the source of the documents, taking the full blame of the crime which gave him a sentence of 20 years in a forced labour camp, but I'll save the rest of that story for when I get to the part about going to the camp.  He showed us the documents which the government decreed that every year there would be 300,000 (I might be wrong about that number...) citizens each year sent off to labour camps without any trial.  That meant that the government could create made up charges and just throw people into the labour camps for no reason, which created a life of fear for each citizen.  There was a listing of the percentage make up of the camps, which he thought was an ironic list of facts.  The highest percentage of the people forced into the camps were from the working class, they made up 30-something percent.  The next highest group was the housewives, who made up 20-something percent.  He didn't mention the exact other groups, but there was a list with somewhere around twenty-five to thirty different groupings of people.  Then we walked into a room with a bunch of intricate and interesting handmade crafts.  He told us that these were things made by people who went in the camp.  The thing that stuck out in my mind the most was the handmade deck of cards, with only four cards shown.  The suits that were used in the deck were: spades, hearts, circles, and acorns.  There were also a bunch of dolls and little outfits that the housewives would make to give to their children when they could come visit them.  The last exhibit that really stood out to me was the part about the church at that time.  When the communists took over, they decided that religion was a bad idea, so they had to get rid of it.  Part of that meant that needed to get rid of the religious officials, like priests and nuns.  Many of these people were sent into the labour camps and forced to work for their "crimes" of being a leader in the church.

After that museum, we went to get some tradition Czech food for lunch in a local restaurant.  I just got the goloush (probably spelled all kinds of wrong) with potato or bread dumplings, I don't remember.  The meat was the interesting part, I think it was deer, but the woman was just saying that it was game, which could be deer, hare, rabbit, pheasant, partridge, or even wild boar according to my Czech guidebook.  Whatever it was, it tasted good, so it doesn't bother me.  The man who had given us the tour came with us to lunch and, once we had finished, we headed out to Vojna.

When I first walked up to the camp, it looks very similar to the images that I have seen of the German concentration camps.  There was even a sign over the gate to the camp that said something about working for your freedom, which is very close to the sign that concentration camps have.  There were the scary looking guard towers all around the barbed wire fence trapping the people inside.  We walked in the open gate and there still had dogs in the guard dog area, which I thought was really cool.  We climbed up the stairs in the new building, so that we could get an  overview of the entire camp and we learned more about our guide's experiences in the camp.  When he first got to the camp, his job was to pluck the feathers from geese to make pillows and stuff like that.  Because of years doing that, both of his index fingers have become permanently curved from the action.  After his time doing that, he worked in a uranium processing portion of the camp.  Oh, I forgot to mention that above, the camps were originally built by the German political prisoners, to force them to work the uranium mines underground.  At the museum, they had a piece of uranium still in the raw for us to see what they were mining and he used the radiation detector to show us the levels that the one piece was just letting into the room.  So the main point of the labor in the camps was for the Uranium mining.  In this camp, they had three mines which the prisoners were forced to work in and there was only about 10% of the Uranium mined, so there is a chance that at some point, if we need Uranium, that people will have to use these mines again.  As a prisoner in the camp, the workers had to work one of the three shifts: 6:00-14:00, 14:00-22:00, or 22:00-6:00.  While working, they were given one meal every 24 hours and it was black coffee and 30 grams of bread, so everyone there was becoming malnourished.  When he told us that the shift started at a given time, what that means is that the workers needed to be at their stations at that time, which took hours.  One of the mines was far enough away from the camp that they would have to march for an hour just to get to work.  From the high up view, we went to see the barracks for the people in solidarity confinement.  These were the people who were being punished for some action they did while in the camps or people who they viewed were dangerous to be around the other prisoners, like political activists.  Our guide told us that he was once locked there for 20 days because he had asked for a reduction in his sentence, but the official charge states that he was there for refusing to report others in an attempt to escape.  While people were in this barrack, they only got food every three days, instead of the normal daily amount.  The next stop was the regular barracks, which showed the small rooms that they would pile lots of people into for sleeping.  It was terrible living conditions, but we didn't have time in our tour to see the rest of the camp.  We had to hurry through that part and then started walking back towards our bus, but as we were walking, our guide pointed out a building.  He told us that it was the Center for Cultural Enlightenment, or something like that.  This was the building that they would force them to dance in and it was where their band preformed on holidays.  During the holidays where the band played, the band would be in this building and all the other prisoners were forced to stand outside, completely still and listen to the music.  The last place that we were able to walk into was a bomb shelter, I think.  It was a tiny, underground concrete room that was unlit and very scary inside.  Before the nicer barracks were build for the prisoners being punished, the guards would just throw them into this room as punishment.  That meant that the walls were covered in marking from all the different prisoners who had been there in the past, but it also sometimes housed dead bodies for days at a time, if not more.  Of the rooms and buildings that we visited, this was the one that definitely gave me the most uncomfortable feeling.  But as soon as we finished seeing that room, it was back to a nice warm bus to go back to the dorm.

Tomorrow I'm going on my other mandatory trip from ECES, which I'm hoping is as interesting as this one, but hopefully not as depressing.