Tag Archives: World War II cemetery

Cemetery of the Week #157: Normandy American Cemetery

Posted on August 16, 2017 | 2 comments

American_military_cemetery_2003Normandy American Cemetery
Also known as the Omaha Beach Cemetery and Cimetière Américain de Normandie
14710, Colleville-sur-Mer, France
Dedicated: 1956
Size: 172.5 acres (70 hectares)
Number of interments: 9387
Open: Except on December 25 and January 1, the cemetery is open daily from 9 am to 6 pm from April 15 to September 15, and from 9 am to 5 pm the rest of the year. Admission closes 15 minutes before closing time. The cemetery is open on holidays in France. When it is open, staff members in the visitor center can answer questions or escort relatives to grave and memorial sites.

The most-visited American military cemetery outside the US stands above a stretch of beach south of the English Channel on the northern coast of France. More than 9,000 men and four women are buried in the Normandy American Cemetery under row upon row of white crosses and Stars of David.

On June 6, 1944 — D-Day — American soldiers joined Allied Forces for the liberation of France.  2499 Americans fell before the Allies chased the Germans from heavily fortified Omaha Beach.

Two days after the landing, the American dead were buried temporarily in the first American cemetery to be established in Europe in World War II.  Called St. Laurent-sur-Mer, the cemetery was a holding place for servicemen until their families could be contacted. Next-of-kin could request repatriation or permanent burial in France. Nearly 60% of the fallen were sent home, while the rest were interred on land donated by France in gratitude for America’s sacrifice.

normandy postcardA half-mile-long access road leads to the Normandy American Cemetery, which covers 172.5 acres on the headlands above the D-Day beaches. The cemetery is the largest US World War II graveyard overseas.  Buried there are 9383 men and four women, victims of various battles. 33 pairs of brothers lie side by side. The graves are aligned on a vast green lawn divided by paths.

A $30 million visitor center was dedicated by the American Battle Monuments Commission in 2007, on the 63rd anniversary of D-Day. The visitor center, which serves as the entrance to the cemetery, welcomes approximately a million people each year.

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Photo by Dennis Jarvis.

At the heart of the cemetery rises a 22-foot-high bronze nude called “Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves,” sculpted by Donald Harcourt De Lue and cast in Italy. The statue is surrounded by gold letters that proclaim, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord.” Behind it stands a semi-circular limestone colonnade that says, “This embattled shore, portal of freedom, is forever hallowed.” At each end of the colonnade is a loggia which displays maps of the Battle of Normandy. The loggias are engraved, “In proud remembrance of the achievements of her sons and in humble tribute to their sacrifices, this memorial has been erected by the United States of America.”

A semicircular garden on the east holds the Walls of the Missing. Its dedication reads: “Here are recorded the names of Americans who gave their lives in the service of their country and who sleep in unknown graves. This is their memorial. The whole Earth their sepulcher. Comrades in Arms whose Resting Place is Known Only to God.” Of the 1557 names listed, some are now marked with rosettes because they have since been discovered and identified.

Two of President Theodore Roosevelt’s sons lie here. Theodore Jr. was the president’s eldest son. He fought in both world wars and received the Medal of Honor. In WWII, he served as a general. He was one of the first Americans to come ashore in France. He landed at Utah Beach, two kilometers farther south than they’d planned, but he encouraged his men by saying, “We’ll start the war from right here!” A month after the landing, he died of a heart condition.

His brother Quentin had died in aerial combat during World War I. He had been buried in Chamery Cemetery in the Marne region of France, but he was brought here to lie beside his brother.

The pathway from the cemetery down to the beach was closed in April 2016, due to security concerns.  A viewing platform overlooks the battlefield, now a peaceful sandy beach that stretches as far as one can see.

Normandy American Cemetery is the largest overseas World War II graveyard, but the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery from World War I contains the remains of 14,000 Americans.

This clip from Saving Private Ryan was filmed in the Normandy American Cemetery:

Useful links:

American Battle Monuments Commission page for the Normandy American Cemetery

Directions to Omaha Beach

Other American military cemeteries on Cemetery Travel:

National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii

The USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Soldiers’ National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia

Fort Mackinac Post Cemetery, Mackinac Island, Michigan

San Francisco National Cemetery, San Francisco, California

Mare Island Cemetery, Vallejo, California

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Death’s Garden: Pastrami in Paris

Posted on November 11, 2016 | 2 comments

deportationby Loren Rhoads

Holding hands inside my coat pocket, Mason and I strolled through the Marais district and enjoyed the watery yellow sunshine. Paris in January was cold. We paused beside a worn brick wall to read the plaque bolted there. Struggling with my imperfect French, I translated the plaque as saying the pockmarks on the wall were bullet holes, left behind when the Nazis shot martyrs.

Our guidebook added that the Nazis and Vichy French dragged 75,000 Jews down this same street on their way to concentration camps.

I was 28 and had no reference for what had happened there, other than a trace of World History in high school. Jews had seemed exotic in the small Michigan farming community where I grew up. Until I met Mason, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t, in some vague way, Christian.

Mason endured his Bar Mitzvah to placate his grandmother. That same grandmother still refused to allow anything of Japanese or German manufacture into her home. She’d disowned Mason for marrying me — without ever meeting me — even though I’d offered to convert. My blood wasn’t Jewish, so our children would not be Jewish. That mattered to her more than her relationship to her only grandson.

Being ostracized was hard for me to understand, harder still to accept. I would never be one of them. Love could not transform me.

It amazed me that Mason loved me enough to cause a rift in his family.

Afterward, to my disappointment, I found that prejudice ran both ways. My Presbyterian mother said that she didn’t care that I was marrying a Jew, but she would have preferred that he at least practiced his religion. My Baptist grandmother sniffed, “At least he isn’t Black,” but raised no objections at the wedding.

I’d grown up so sheltered; I hadn’t seen the prejudice in my own family. Visiting Europe for the first time opened my eyes to the scope of bigotry against the Jews.

Rue des Rosiers, the street we strolled, had served as the main artery of the historic Jewish quarter of Paris. The quarter had been created in the thirteenth century when King Phillipe Auguste “invited” the Jewish merchants living in front of Notre-Dame to move outside the newly built city wall. The name Rosiers referred to the rosebushes that grew against the outside of the wall. I admired people who found beauty, despite their exile from the safety of the city.

After some consultation of the map, Mason led us to Jo Goldenberg’s deli. Paris Access reported that on August 9, 1982, masked gunmen threw a grenade into the deli, then opened fire as people fled. They injured twenty-two customers and killed six. The PLO took credit for the murders. The gunmen remain unknown.

While we were in Paris, the First Gulf War tore apart Iraq. Throughout Paris, armed soldiers guarded the national treasures. Mason and I read the Herald Tribune each day, dreading the news that Iraq had unleashed germ warfare against Israel. Half-convinced that Jews and those who loved them were safe nowhere, I feared entering the deli.

Added to that, I’d only been in one deli in my life: Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, which my mother-in-law proclaimed was as good as those she’d grown up with in Brooklyn. In big, dark Zingerman’s, I’d kept to familiar foods like egg salad. I daringly ordered it on pumpernickel, which I’d confused with rye bread. In my defense, I’d had a purely white bread childhood. While I explored knishes and hamentashen and Doctor Brown’s cream soda at Zingerman’s, I remained a Presbyterian-raised girl only a couple of years off the farm. I didn’t know corned beef from pastrami. I just thought I didn’t like it.

Goldenberg’s deli was huge and bright inside. The people behind the counter bustled around in spotless white aprons. Their middle-aged patrons filled string shopping bags with packages handed over the counter wrapped in white paper.

Mason and I nudged each other forward. He wanted me to order, in my fractured French. I wanted him to do it, because I felt like such an outsider.

While he negotiated with the counterman, I wandered around the fringes of the salesroom, looking over the merchandise. I didn’t recognize most of it. What was matzo, or gefilte fish? Nothing had prices that I could see. I chose a bottle of wine that I hoped would be both inexpensive and palatable, a vin table rouge. I slipped it onto the counter as Mason got ready to pay.

“You want this too?” the man behind the counter asked in English.

I nodded, too shy to speak.

*

Mason and I stopped to eat in the little park behind Notre-Dame. We huddled together on a green bench. The buttery orange late afternoon sunlight gave little warmth. It flared from the stained glass windows of the great cathedral.

deportation2Nearby stood the Deportation Memorial, which honors the 200,000 French men and women of all races and religions murdered by the Nazis in World War II. One wall of the memorial is starred with 200,000 backlit crystals: one burning for each life snuffed out. Visiting the memorial the previous day had been the first time I’d encountered the command to “Forgive, but never forget.”

How could you forgive?

How could you live without forgiving?

Mason unwrapped the sandwich and handed half to me. The pastrami piled so high I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to bite it. Instead, I contented myself with nibbling. The pastrami had a marvelous metallic tang beneath its mouthwateringly salty flavor. The caraway seeds in the rye bread burst between my teeth. I laid my head against Mason’s shoulder and swooned, chewing with eyes closed in order to savor. I’d never had a sandwich so delicious.

We ate until we were thirsty, but Mason wasn’t comfortable swigging from the bottle of wine in the park. We decided to cross the Petit Pont back to our hotel in the Latin Quarter.
The Hotel Esmeralda dates from 1640. Huge yellow boulders, mortared together, formed the outside walls. We laughed that such a place would never survive an earthquake. A single steep, narrow stairway wound up from the lobby to the warren of rooms. We saw no such thing as a smoke detector or a fire escape. We found the place charming.

In our little room, I’d been reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I’d read the book as a child, but it came so much more alive for me now, in a hotel named for the Gypsy dancing girl across the river from the cathedral. Still, I’d had to put the book down in a moment of horror when I reached the crones gossiping over the Foundling’s Bed. On viewing the child Quasimodo, one of the women said, “I should guess that it’s a beast, an animal — the offspring of a Jew and a sow — something, at any rate, which is not Christian.”

My God, I thought. How could people have said such a thing, and meant it? I know that fiction does not equal reality, but twentieth-century bigotry had been so much worse than Victor Hugo could have imagined.

*

That frosty January evening, our small steam-heated room remained chilly. Mason and I snuggled together in our clothes on the soft bed, pulling the blankets up over our knees. We each drank deeply from the bottle of wine, which turned out to be the perfect complement to the sandwich: rich and thick and slightly sweet. It chased the robust flavors of pastrami on rye across my tongue and touched a flush to my cheeks. We rested the wine bottle on the rickety nightstand and held the remainders of the sandwich carefully, so that pastrami did not slip between our fingers.

I thought I was in heaven, even before Mason produced dessert. Generally, I don’t like cheesecake. Mason regarded this, with amused resignation, as a character flaw. I agreed to sample a bite of this cheesecake, only a bite, when he held it toward me on his fork.

Jo Goldenberg’s was like no other cheesecake I’d ever sampled. It melted inside my mouth, exquisitely sweet and creamy. It tasted not too rich, not at all cloying. The texture was just dense enough to be solid, but not gummy like the cheesecake my mom made from a box. The subtle aftertaste of lemon lingered on my tongue.

I found it impossible not to watch as the fork traveled from the dwindling slice in the small white box to Mason’s mouth. He laughed and fed me the final bite.

And then I was in heaven: safe in the arms of the man I loved, cozy and sated in an old hotel in Paris, tasting the trace of sweetness on my husband’s lips.

“Pastrami in Paris” was originally published on Trip Lit in January 2003. It was reprinted in 2014 as part of All You Need is Morbid on Wattpad.

***

Death's Garden001About the Death’s Garden project:

I am getting ready to finish the Death’s Garden project. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, please get in touch SOON. I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation — or if you got married in one. The submissions guidelines are here.

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Death’s Garden: Communing with the Dead

Posted on December 18, 2015 | 1 comment

by George V. Neville-Neil

cropped-pl-panorama001.jpg

Panorama of Pere Lachaise by Loren Rhoads

In 1998, I quit my job as a manager in a software firm and decided to bounce around Europe, a place I’d lived and worked in, but never really visited. I made my entrance to Europe through London, where I visited the long-standing (since 1886) anarchist bookstore run by Freedom Press.

Contrary to popular belief, anarchists are some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. While checking out the small, well-kept shop, I struck up a conversation with Kevin, who was working there. He was kind enough to point me to some works that could further my learning, including Anarchist Portraits by Paul Avrich. It had also been recommended by a friend.

In all of the historical—and many of the theoretical—works were references to past events I had never heard of. The one that most struck a chord with me was the Paris Commune of 1871.

The short version of the story is that in 1870, France was stupid enough to attack their much better armed Prussian neighbors to the east. They got walloped. The French government fled Paris. The people of Paris, who had declared revolution many times before (1789 and 1848 being the best-known examples), declared a commune and barricaded the city. Life was reorganized along anarcho-communist lines: each person contributed what he could and consumed what was necessary. The defense of Paris began.

The Prussians, of course, wanted someone to surrender to them. However, the Commune was not a government, as 19th-century Europeans understood it. The Commune held out until the 21st-28th of May, when the Prussians—acting with the consent and aid of the French government-in-exile—massacred the people of the Commune. They killed 3,000 in the actual battle and over 20,000 in executions and revenge murders. This was commemorated, so my books said, by a marker in Père Lachaise Cemetery. This I had to see.

I arrived in Paris on a cold, dark February afternoon. I had a few hours to kill before my train to Barcelona. I took the Metro directly to the Père Lachaise stop.

Paris in February is not known for its beauty. As I ascended the steps from the Metro, I was greeted by a cold gray sky. The neighborhood around Père Lachaise was then an Arabic immigrant community. Mingled with the usual Parisian smells of car exhaust, urine, dog shit, and fresh bread were less familiar odors of Arabic cooking. If it’s always an experience leaving a Metro stop, this one was doubly so.

The stop nearest the graveyard was in the middle of a large traffic island, so I had to walk through traffic to get to the entrance of the cemetery. This particular entrance was not the main one, which stood 100 yards further along at the westernmost part of the cemetery.

I climbed the small set of stairs and entered the cemetery proper. Immediately I noticed a map, which was good, as I didn’t want to ask, “Where are the Communards buried?” in my limited French. The Communards themselves didn’t seem to be on the map, but I noticed that the cemetery was divided into zones, such as those for scientists, philosophers, and political figures. I figured that the latter was my goal. It was, of course, clear across the cemetery. To compound my problems, the cemetery was only open for another hour. With a train to catch, I didn’t want to be locked in: a very real possibility, since the cemetery had a high fence around it.

The cemetery itself was quite large, especially for a city as physically small as Paris. Père Lachaise is a ½-mile on each side. Each internal cobblestone roadway and dirt path was named or numbered. This organization strikes me as Napoleonic, Napoleon being the inventor of the now-infamous French bureaucracy.

As I walked the cobblestone Avenue Circular, it surprised me that the tombs were all aboveground. Paris, thanks to the River Seine, has a high water table. Many of the tombs and monuments were quite ornate. Some were beautiful. Angels predominated as the type of sculpture. Beautifully sculpted female faces smiled down on the dearly departed. The French not only brought fresh flowers to the dead, but also some glazed ceramic versions of flowers. Those they left on or near the tombs as one would leave flowers. Even more ornate were the white stone plaques, like miniature headstones, set atop the monuments with personal messages to the deceased. These ranged in size from 8×10 to 12×16 inches. They carried messages such as “To our beloved son,” “Our darling mother,” “Our brave soldier,” etc.

Aux Morts plaque w-flowers

Communard Memorial photographed by George Neville-Neil

It took me about 20 minutes to cross the cemetery. I was prepared for quite a search. I mean, who cares about a bunch of long-dead anarchists? Thankfully, I was wrong. The marker wasn’t just a small thing in the ground. On the east wall of the cemetery itself, the marker was three feet high by five feet wide and said “Paris Communards 1871.” Even more amazing, the area was obviously well tended. There were a large number of bouquets all around it. I was awestruck. Someone—many people, in fact—not only remembered, but cared enough to visit. Even though I was alone, I realized I was with people I might know and like if I met them in person.

I took a few photos and decided I had time to look around more. As I turned around, I saw what I had not noticed on the map. Immediately across the Avenue Circulaire from the Communards were all the Monuments aux Deportées.

These sculptures commemorated all those killed by the Nazis and the Vichy government during World War II. Large, beautifully simple (in the style of modern sculpture) monuments were engraved with the names “Auschwitz,” “Birkenau,” and “Belsen.” Each commemorated hundreds of thousands of people killed.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz Memorial photographed by George Neville-Neil

 

These were not adorned with flowers but instead, in the style of Jewish visitors to cemeteries, had small stones left on them. The monuments were all covered with many stones. I do not know the origin of this custom, being an atheist and only culturally Jewish, but I knew what it meant: “We were here.”

Auschwitz plaque copyThe combination of the memorials proved too much for me. I found tears running down my face. Tears can mean many things; in this case, they were angry tears, wept in frustration at the stupidity of my race, the human race. I sat down and just looked at the stones, then walked back to read them all one more time.

It was getting late, so I found the nearest exit, the Porte de la Reunion. I went to find some paper to write on, some food to eat, and a Metro back to my night train to Barcelona.

*

My second trip to Père Lachaise was a little different. I gave myself plenty of time, arriving at 10:30 a.m. I brought two flowers—yellow roses, which the French call “Rose Texas.” I find that funny. The Metro stop was the same; the cemetery was the same. Thankfully, the weather was a bit nicer, since it was September.

I placed one rose sticking out from behind the plaque for the Communards, a popular place to leave single flowers. The other went on the Auschwitz memorial, not because I know anyone who was killed there—my family had mostly immigrated to the United States before the First World War—but because it’s the name I always think of when I think of concentration camps. I guess that’s branding for you.

Angry tears still overwhelmed me.

George’s coda:

It has been 17 years since I wrote about my visits to Père Lachaise. While I visited Paris several times in the interim, I had not returned to the cemetery.  In August of 2015, I was again visiting a close friend in Paris, and, as usual, he and I spent many hours walking around the city.

Paris is a wonderful city to walk in.  When you tire, there are cafes in which to sit and drink coffee. When you want to go home, you can always hope the Metro.  We walked and talked about our usual topics: our lives, our loves, politics, and the state of the world.  It was early August, but not too hot for a long stroll, but by noon we knew that it was time to sit some where shaded and take lunch.  

After lunch, he asked if I’d like to visit Père Lachaise again, knowing about my previous pilgrimage there and my feelings about the Commune.  He rarely, if ever, visited the cemetery and asked one of the workers where to find the plaque.

We walked one of the long walks along the edge of the cemetery and returned to the political wing of Père Lachaise.  There were still bouquets and flowers at the Commune’s plaque and at the monuments to the dead of previous wars.

What surprised me this time was that there were several new monuments. The first I noticed was for the genocide in Rwanda.  While that event had occurred before my first visit, the monument had not yet been erected.  As I looked around, I saw other monuments to those moments in the news where we occasionally pause and reflect upon our brutality.  I guess I should not have been surprised.  Humanity’s violence, of course, has not abated and so there will always be new monuments in this area, one for each new, known, horrific act of man upon man.  Who knows what I’ll find when I return again?

***

george_neville-neil05George Neville-Neil is a quiet Irish boy trapped in the body of a Jewish anarchist. He’s written about finding his landlord dead, getting tested for AIDS, cruising, and anarchy in Père Lachaise for Morbid Curiosity magazine and appeared in Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues.  This essay initially appeared in Morbid Curiosity #6.

***

About the Death’s Garden project:

For the next year, I’m planning to put a cemetery essay up every Friday. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation — or if you got married in one. The submissions guidelines are here.

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Cemetery of the Week #128: National Cemetery of Terezin

Posted on March 12, 2014 | 1 comment
The Star of David over the graveyard at Terezin.

The Star of David over the graveyard at Terezin.

National Cemetery of Terezin
Národní Hrbitov v Terezíne
Terezin, Czech Republic
Dedicated: September 16, 1945
Number of graves: 2386
Number of interments: About 10,000. Only 1133 bodies buried here could be identified.
Open: The Small Fortress is open daily November to March from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and from April to October from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Admission: A ticket to enter both the Ghetto Museum and Small Fortress costs 200Kc for adults, 150Kc for children. For more information or reservations for guided tours, call tel. 416-782-225 or go to the Terezin Memorial page.

About an hour outside of Prague stands Terezin, formerly a garrison town built by Emperor Joseph II in the 1790s. Gavrilo Princip was held at the Small Fortress after he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, setting off World War I. During World War II, the Nazis converted the town of Terezin — which they called Theresienstandt — into a Jewish ghetto. They used the nearby fortress as a concentration camp.

During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the villagers of Terezin were evicted from their homes so that Hitler could turn the entire town into a Jewish ghetto. The Nazis called Terezin Hitler’s gift to the Jews, in an attempt to refute the world’s suspicion that Germany had Jewish blood on its hands. Jews from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union were herded into the village, where the Gestapo demanded they “govern” themselves. The town council, elected by the Nazis, was forced to draw up lists—to fulfill Nazi quotas—of Jews to be sent over the border into Poland to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In 1944, the Danish Red Cross visited the ghetto. They pronounced Theresienstadt a model for the care of political prisoners. As they toured, a jazz band (called The Ghetto Swingers) played a catchy tune. Shop windows displayed formal wear. Everyone ate at an outdoor cantina. Money filled the bank. Prisoners wore street clothes, rather than striped uniforms. Everyone had shoes and hats and overcoats. Behind the façade lay reality, which the Red Cross did not examine. Over 85% percent of the 140,000 people who passed through Terezin died. Three hundred inmates died each day from “natural causes.” Trains carried 87,000 people o Auschwitz-Birkenau. Barely 4,000 “citizens” of Terezin survived the war.

Coffins after the war, awaiting burial.

Coffins after the war, awaiting burial.

Down the road at the Little Fortress, conditions were even worse. Of the 32,000 people imprisoned in the Little Fortress during the war, 2500 died of their mistreatment. Another 5,000 were sent on to die in the extermination camps. After the Soviets liberated the rest in May 1945, 500 more former prisoners died of malnutrition and typhoid.

Inside the Little Fortress stands a tunnel that served as a mortuary, where corpses of tortured prisoners piled up until survivors could transport them to the nearby crematorium. During the last three years of the war, the crematorium’s four trolley-fed ovens burned night and day, disposing of 30,000 bodies from the Fortress, the ghetto, and Flossenbürg work camp over the border in Bavaria. We saw the wall where firing squads executed prisoners. 601 of their victims had been buried in shallow graves until after the war, when they were exhumed and reburied with ceremony outside the Fortress’s front gate.

After the war, all the graves were marked with little wooden crosses.

After the war, all the graves were marked with little wooden crosses.

The Národní Hrbitov v Terezíne, the National Cemetery of Terezin, was designed to honor the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. Immediately after the war, at the prodding of survivors, the vicinity of the prison was excavated to recover all the bodies. Gradually, between 1945 and 1958, some 10,000 victims from the Small Fortress, the ghetto of Terezin, and Flossenbürg work camp were reburied in the National Cemetery. Of those, fewer than 1200 lie in individual, named graves. The rest remain nameless. Perhaps one day genetic testing will discover who they were, if they have any relatives left with which to compare them.

A tall cross with a ring of barbed wire at the intersection of its arms towers above the graves. It was erected in 1992. In response, a smaller Star of David was raised closer to the prison wall in 1995. More poignant to me were the uncountable stones marked only by numbers of victims in the mass graves below my feet. Not even the years of death could be guessed or recorded. A low granite tablet with the number 10 000 remembered those who vanished into the crematorium.

From the Czech guidebook to the cemetery, a view of the graveyard from the road.

From the Czech guidebook to the cemetery, a view of the graveyard from the road.

It’s possible to take a local bus out of Prague to Terezin and walk from the modern town back to the Small Fortress. That’s much cheaper than taking a guided tour, but I was so exhausted by the stories we heard on our tour that I was glad to collapse into our air-conditioned coach and not have to worry about getting myself back to Prague. Your mileage may vary.

Useful links:

Numbers of people buried in each section of the graveyard

A reading list on Terezin

A bus tour to Terezin

Frommer has driving directions and more touring suggestions.

Trailer for the Oscar-nominated documentary, The Lady in Number Six: Music Saved My Life, about Alice Herz Sommer, the world’s oldest living survivor of the Holocaust, who died earlier this year.  She was interned in the ghetto at Terezin and survived by playing in the orchestra. The Nazis ordered them to play as the trains were being loaded to take people to the extermination camps.

Other Czech cemeteries on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #4: The Old Jewish Cemetery

Cemetery of the Week #38: the Bone Chapel of Kutná Hora

Cemetery of the Week #39: The New Jewish Cemetery

Cemetery of the Week #59: Vysehrad Cemetery

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Cemetery of the Week #26: the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Posted on August 3, 2011 | 3 comments

The Atomic Dome

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
c/o Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
1-2 Nakajimama-cho, Naka-ku, Hirosima City 730-0811, Japan
Telephone: +81-82-241-4004
Established: 1952
Number of interments: 70,000 or more
Admission: The park is free to visitors. Admission to the museum is 50 yen for adults, 30 yen for children under 18.
Museum hours: 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. (or until 7 p.m. in August). Admission ends 30 minutes before closing time. Closed: December 29 to January 1.

The Genbaku Domu — the Atomic Dome — caps the ruins of the Industrial Promotion Hall on the shore of the Ota-gawa River: Ground Zero on August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the world’s first atomic weapon. The bomb exploded, as hot as the surface of the sun, leveling tens of thousands of buildings instantly. The rubbish was set afire by the burning winds. Only the Industrial Promotion Hall, at the eye of the storm, survived amidst the devastation.

Behind the Atomic Dome, the entry to the Peace Museum winds through a darkened hallway. Photographs in window frames recorded the surrounding destruction. Here and there buildings huddled amidst the rubble, windows gaping and roofs ripped away. In the black-and-white photos, Hiroshima glowed the color of ashes.

In another room, little cases display articles of clothing, still stained with blood 60-some years later. In clipped BBC English, the narrative tape assures that the Germans, Russians, British, Italians, and Japanese had all been developing atomic weapons. Whoever won the race and produced the first nuclear bomb felt they had to drop it before the others could. The narration carefully deflected blame from America.

Hiroshima had been chosen as a target specifically because it was an industrial city with a large population that had escaped the firebombing inflicted on the rest of Japan. Any damage Hiroshima received on August 6, 1945 could be attributed solely to the atom bomb.

On that day, children had been released from school to create fire lanes through town in case America dropped conventional bombs. After the daily American fly-over at 7 a.m., the all-clear siren sounded. Everyone who could be outside was, leading to the staggering loss of life: 140,000 the first day.

Winds generated by the bomb fanned a firestorm that leveled 75% of the buildings between the mountains and the sea. Museum cases held a pair of broken eyeglasses or a dented metal water bottle: sole mementos of children who vanished that day. One of the cases contained fingernail clippings and dried strips of skin, all that a woman had been able to save of her husband.

Outside the museum, the Peace Memorial Park holds a jumble of monuments. A polished granite cenotaph in the shape of a bomb recorded the names of the victims. Millions of paper cranes, folded out of bright origami paper, lay in heaps around it. Nearby stood a statue of Kannon, bodhisattva of mercy. The most shocking sculpture captured an almost fishlike creature, fallen on one side, supported in midair at the shoulder and hip. Its limbs had been reduced to sticks, its features and flesh chiseled away. It looked like nothing so much as a charred corpse.

The simplest monument is a grave. In the center of the park, a grassy mound rises like the barrows on Salisbury Plain. This tumulus holds such victims as could be recovered, pried out of collapsed buildings or hauled, bloated, from the contaminated river.

A plaque said that the barrow contained the ashes of the 70,000 victims. In keeping with Buddhist tradition, they had all been cremated. The mound of ashes stood twelve feet high.

Nearby, a huge deep bell tolls. In Japan, temple bells are upended cups of bronze. They have no clappers. Instead, a baton — sometimes big as a tree trunk — is suspended outside the bell. Anyone can pull the striker back and let it swing forward to sound the bell. In this case, every peal said a prayer for the repose of the dead.

This Saturday, August 6, the city of Hiroshima will hold a Peace Memorial Ceremony with speeches, the laying of wreathes at monuments in the Peace Park, and a moment of silence at 8:15 a.m., the time when the bomb was dropped.  More information is here.

Useful links:

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Guided Tour of the Peace Park

Why the Peace Park is a World Heritage site

Tourist information

Related posts on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #44: the Arizona Memorial

My visit to the Arizona and thoughts about Hiroshima

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