PARKSVILLE, NY — “It was unexpected, the way it hit. I had no preconceptions.”

Hope Blecher of Parksville traveled to the Czech Republic this summer. While there, she paid her respects at Terezin—or Theresienstadt—the concentration camp where a family member had been imprisoned during World War II.

She also visited Balmoral, the estate in Scotland where Queen Elizabeth II died.

The camp

A military fortress and garrison, Terezin has been in existence since the 18th century.

But after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, they adapted the fortress as a ghetto and concentration camp, interring Czech Jews and “persons of ‘special merit,’” according to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center.

The ghetto was also a stopping point as Jews from all over Europe were sent to death camps.

Although tens of thousands died of disease or malnutrition at Terezin, the fact that it was not a death camp meant that when the Red Cross came to check on reports of extermination, the camp “was presented as a ‘model Jewish settlement’ for propaganda purposes,” the page on Yad Vashem reads.

It also meant that culture was able to thrive as best it could. Costumes were created out of bits of clothing, Blecher said. “For Purim, they had a show.”

People wrote poetry, drew, painted. Musicians played. It was a performance for the Red Cross, and when the show was over, Terezin reverted to what it was. A prison and performance both.

The moments of culture there were “all staged,” she said again. “They couldn’t have a moment of unadulterated joy.”

The camp was set up in two sections—Terezin 1 and Terezin 2—and the Nazis and their families lived in one part. “There was a green lawn. A swimming pool. Badminton courts,” Blecher said. “And nearby, the people in the camp,” who were starving and dying. How do you live like that? she asked. “How can you think that is a way to treat people?”

A map of Terezin

Ghost town

For Blecher, the experience was surreal. “You see as it was left,” she said. It was a functional town before the war, and it still is. But “you could almost feel that the were still here. People went back. I couldn’t come out every day and know what happened there.”

The signs are there. The literal signs—“Crematorium,” for instance—“were left there for a reason,” Blecher said.

For memory.

“They left it as a graveyard.”

A week later, she was at Balmoral.

The acknowledgement on the Balmoral monument

A closeup of the Balmoral monument and the swastikas.

On the estate grounds

Balmoral, the Scottish estate of Britain’s royal family, is magnificent, castle-like, and open to the public for part of the year, when the family is not in residence.

At that point, the parts catering to tourists are taken down. Presumably for security, a gate closes off the estate, shutting down a road.

The gate opens and the tourist-focused section is replaced when the family leaves.

For Blecher, it was beautiful and jarring.

On the grounds, there’s a memorial to the men from the estates in the region, who died in World War I. It’s made of the same granite as the castle.

Under the names are two rows of swastikas.

Granted, the memorial was put up before the Nazis co-opted the symbol. Granted, it once meant “well being, fortune and luck” as an inscription on the monument notes.

But it was a shock.

Why wasn’t the list of names taken down, replaced with a list without swastikas?

“Is it better to have the description or to take it down and put it in a museum?” Blecher asked rhetorically.

And what does it say when it is left in place?

History’s weight

It’s a story about how two different places cope with their history.

“The word that I have found to best describe it is juxtaposition of one’s position in life,” Blecher said later.

Liberation

Remember, said Hope Blecher. The people of Czechoslovakia had four years of freedom after World War II before the Iron Curtain came down.

“They fought against what was happening,” she said. But the Soviet juggernaut was too strong. “They weren’t liberated until 1989.”

Before liberation, relatives in the U.S. dared not visit. They were afraid they couldn’t get out, Blecher said.

That’s changed, of course, but history still casts a shadow. In Prague, she saw “many, many Ukrainian flags.”

That, she said, is because the people of the Czech Republic understood.

An aged woman forcibly taken from her home.

Taken to a strange and frightening place, with no idea what would happen to her. Where she died, her ashes inurned in a mass grave.

And then, “a week later, I was strolling the grounds where an elderly woman had died and laid in state.”

The grounds were well manicured and the place was beautiful.

One woman who would not meet her descendants, and a woman who had them by her side.

A woman who walked on stones, and a woman who saw green fields wherever she looked.

“The stones versus the vast green countryside and abundance—that stark reality hit me,” she said.

How do you make sense of an experience like this?

Hope Blecher created poetry.

You can read the poems at https://medium.com/@hopedoc1/stones-witness-stones-the-juxtaposition-of-terezin-and-balmoral-64d5502befcf, and at https://medium.com/@hopedoc1/ode-to-balmoral-part-two-f91b2c63076b