Since 1992 a memorial in the city centre of České Budějovice remembers the synagogue blown up in 1942 and the murdered Jews of the city.
History
Jews lived in the Southern Bohemian city of České Budějovice (German: Budweis or Böhmisch Budweis) since the 14th century, the first synagogue was built about 1380. However, the medieval Jewish community was destroyed during various pogroms around 1500. Only since the middle of the 19th century were Jews allowed to settle in the city again which they did in growing numbers. During the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the city experienced a rapid growth and more and more Czechs moved to the previously largely German-speaking city. About 1900 the Jewish community had approximately 2,000 members out of a total population of 45,000. The most important symbol of their presence was the red brick neo-Gothic synagogue with its two high, church-like spires built in 1887/88.
After the breakup of Austria-Hungary České Budějovice was part of the new Czechoslovakian state. In 1939 the German Reich smashed Czechoslovakia and created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, České Budějovice being part of it. The anti-Jewish policy of the National Socialists immediately had its effect on the Jews of České Budějovice. In 1940 Jewish businesses and homes were confiscated. On April 18, 1942 the remaining 909 Jews of České Budějovice were deported to the ghetto camp of Theresienstadt (Czech: Terezín). Most of them did not survive the Holocaust. The synagogue was blown up on July 5, 1942, one day after Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office and Deputy Reich-Protector died as a result of an assassination attempt in Prague. The remains of the building were subsequently pulled down.
Victims
Of the approximately 1,200 Jews that lived in České Budějovice prior to the smashing of Czechoslovakia only very few survived the ghetto camp of Terezín or the subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. Exact numbers are not known.
Until 1918, the Czech regions of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War they merged with Slovakia to form Czechoslovakia. From autumn 1938 to spring 1939 the state was gradually broken up by the Third Reich. In September 1938 Germany annexed the northern and western border region, which had a majority German population. This was now known as the »Sudetengau« (Sudetenland administration district). The remaining territory, the so-called rump state, was taken by the German Wehrmacht on March 14, 1939. At the same time Slovakia declared independence. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist and the Czech regions now came under German control as the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The emerging civilian resistance was brutally crushed and the persecution of Jews and Roma began. Around 78,000 of the approximately 120,000 Jews of Bohemia were murdered in the Holocaust. The former fortress of Theresienstadt (Terezín) served as a central detention camp and a transit camp for those being deported to the extermination sites in Eastern Europe. Around 8,000 non-Jewish Czechs were also killed, some 1,700 during the wave of terror following the assassination of the Deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942) on May 27, 1942. In response to this assassination, German police forces razed the village of Lidice and the hamlet of Ležáky to the ground. Four days before the end of the war in 1945, an armed rebellion broke out in Prague and other Czech regions. It was directed above all at Czech collaborators and the German minority.
Memory of the period 1938 to 1945 centres above all on the trauma of the complete dismemberment of the country. Focus was placed on National Socialist crimes and for a long time the desire for revenge. One of the consequences was the expulsion of the German-speaking population. Remembrance today however also encompasses the painful awareness of the relatively weak extent of resistance and the widespread collaboration.
The re-established state of Czechoslovakia became communist in 1948. There was barely any remembrance of the Holocaust, especially as the country was overcome by a wave of anti-semitism during the peak of the Stalinist purges in the early 1950s. Along with the homage to the victorious Red Army that was standard in the »Eastern Bloc«, the Czechoslovakian culture of memory focused particularly on the massacre at Lidice. This made it possible to represent National Socialist brutality without having to remember the Holocaust.
A change set in with the collapse of communism from 1989 onwards; a change that had emerged once before during the Czech reform period known as the Prague Spring in 1968, before coming to an end with the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops. Hence, parts of Czech society gradually began to also remember the co-existence of Czech, German and Jewish cultures that had been built up over centuries but has now disappeared. Traces of this multicultural past are more and more visible, not only in the capital Prague. Meanwhile, the most important site of remembrance for the victims of the holocaust is the Terezín Memorial on the site of the former Theresienstadt Ghetto. Since the 1990s there have been public disputes over the former concentration camp at Lety, where Bohemian Roma were forcibly detained prior to their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. For decades, a pig farm was located on the site, making appropriate remembrance impossible. The pig farm was finally dismantled in 2022 to make place for a new memorial.
Remembrance
After the war České Budějovice was again part of Czechoslovakia where in 1948 a communist dictatorship was established. Until 1970 a small Jewish community existed, in 1950 a small memorial remembering the murdered Jews of České Budějovice was erected on the Jewish cemetery. Apart from that there was no official memory to the former Jewish inhabitants of the city until the end of the regime in 1989.
In 1999 a Holocaust memorial was erected on the site of the former synagogue, remembering the synagogue as well as the fate of the deported. The costs for the memorial were borne by the city of České Budějovice and by the Jewish community of Prague. The restoration of the jewish cemetery was also paid for by the Jewish community of Prague.
