In that famous cemetery in Prague’s Jewish Quarter you will find hordes of tourists.  Here in Mikoluv, you need to be let in by the young woman with the key. She is the daughter of our cycling tour’s owner, Tom Leskovjanova.

Here, we wandered alone, among 15th century headstones. Headstones that had been stacked and layered to create the next terrace that they filled with dirt in order to bury more people.

The Jews were restricted from expanding their cemetery, or anything else for that matter, so they built up. Layers of soil and old headstones created the next level of ground for burials. There is now no clear idea how many thousands of bodies are layered beneath our feet as we stand in the shifting light.

There are no Jews left in this city, but there are about ten dedicated people who call themselves the Friends of Jewish Society. These are the people, like Tom and his daughter with that huge skeleton key, who have made a small museum, the volunteers who transcribe and record each headstone so when people come to trace their ancestors, the work has been done.

Ten people with no Jewish background, but the profound understanding that all this needs to be remembered and dignified by the very act of remembering. They honour their town’s history that at one time included 12 synagogues. There is one left, it’s now a museum. A museum that Hitler helped to build in his perverse plan to create a remembrance of the very people he was intent on annihilating. I find myself shaking my head even as I write and remember it again.

It stuns me. Our capacity for hate, and then, seeing young Barbora Leskovjanova with the cemetery key and her passion in telling these stories, our capacity for love and redemption.

In a different cemetery in Trebon, our guide Lada Ptacek translated the words over the gate, it read: 

“As we are, you shall be. As you are, we once were.”