HistoryAndBeer Tour 2014: Děčín and Terezín

Děčín. We didn't much care for the city at first. While our accommodation was a winner - a former monastery on top of a hill - the blocks at the bottom had more cigarette butts than grass. We could have looked past the concrete and rust to the city's pretty castle, but instead we chose to spend our daytime in Bohemian Switzerland (České Švýcarsko, in Czech) the national park space around Děčín. 

Follow the orange backpack for a short hike through the woods...

Ye old monastery-converted-to-a-hotel

The view from our rustic little room

J-dog, queen of the lumber

Setting off

Higher and higher and higher

Blue-black beetles; made me think of "Moonrise Kingdom"

Fun sandstone

J-dog maneuvered 'round the labyrinth quite well

 

Swallowed by rocks 

Reached our destination....

...Pravčická brána, the largest natural rock arch on the continent!

BEER:
Not much to report on this front, other than we cooled our heels with a cold one at the end of the hike. Budvar was the nectar on offer. Fun fact: Budvar was the original Budweiser, which Anheuser Busch nicked, thus resulting in multiple lawsuits across the pond. Now, Budvar is called Czechvar in America, while the American Budweiser is only allowed to be called Bud in Europe. Whew!

This joint is nestled next to the rock bridge

La vista hermosa

An apt trophy

More view

HISTORY:
We made a spur-of-the-moment stop at Terezín on the way home. It's a military fortress-turned-concentration camp that's now a dusty little town, and we would have spent more time there had the rental car not needed to be returned in a couple of hours. We just didn't give it the time it deserved.

Terezín is unique because the Nazis used it as a "model" camp; they made it look like a small city by planting flowers and putting up dummy stores when the Red Cross came to visit in 1943. However, in reality it was overcrowded, starved and disease-ridden. About 33,000 of the almost 200,000 people who passed through its gates perished there. The majority of the rest were shipped East to extermination camps like Auschwitz. Of the 15,000 children who were at Terezín, only 132 were known to have survived, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

We couldn't take pictures inside any of the buildings at the concentration camp - understandably so. But the museum spaces had elaborate exhibits on art created by children in the camp and the conditions of the "dormitories." Heart-wrenching.

The railroad tracks are still there

A structure where prisoners' ashes were stored

The cemetery

Outside of the crematorium

Old garrison ramparts that ended up being used for things like target practice - with live targets

Aside from the somber things we learned, we found out that many Jewish musical, literary, artistic and theatrical greats had been imprisoned at Terezín and produced magnificent works of art while there. I'd like to research that further. Also, I read that Sigmund Freud had four sisters who were deported to Terezín, as were relatives of a certain American... U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

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HistoryAndBeer Tour 2014: Dresden

Only halfway through our trip - when we were driving amoeba-like loops in the suburban cusp of Dresden - did we remember our friend KPow loaned us a GPS navigator and it was packed in a bag in the trunk. Phew!

Remembering the GPS a lot earlier would have saved us a chunk of hassle, but it also would have prevented us from seeing as much as we did of the "Jewel Box of Saxony", a city that was nearly completely obliterated in the final months of WWII. (Oh - and the Prussians did a number on it in the 18th century, as well.)

The vast majority of the tourists in the city were German, though international tourism there has increased. BW and I liked the place immensely.

Inside the Zwinger Palace. Built in the early 1700s, it served as a festival place for court events and exhibitions

The Zwinger's Glockenspielpavilion. Say that five times.

A stupefyingly gorgeous city; this is the Alstadt (old town)

My man Martin Luther! More on the church in the background below...

Inside Pfund's Dairy, where I bought blue cheese

"Procession of Princes" - a 334-ft-long ceramic mural depicting 35 noblemen of Saxony

"The Funnel Wall" in Neustadt (new town), Dresden's alternative neighborhood. It plays music when it rains.

The Brothers Grimm in German. So cute.

We had a lazy walk along the River Elbe - and ate our blue cheese

Tuckered out

BEER

For a country steeped in domestic beer, it was surprising to see so many Czech brands on offer. Still, BW had a solid Heffeweizen he described as "a cloudy glass of citrusy goodness" in the beer garden at Katy's Garage in the alternative Neustadt neighborhood.

Even J-dog begged for a tiny finger-dipped lick. Yes, she had water!

Our view from the beer garden

On Easter Sunday, we visited a trio of castles on a cliff overlooking the city. We'd have never known about them had our Air BnB host not tipped us off. One of the castles had a sunny terrace that lured us in with its roasting sausages and cold beverages. BW tried a German beer I can't spell (or pronounce, for that matter) there.

Schloss Albrechtsberg

Packed with Germans enjoying their Easter Sunday

HISTORY
Every groove in our brain matter was packed with historical info in Dresden. As in the other tour posts, we're focusing on WWII.

On Easter Sunday, we attended a German-language church service at the Frauenkirche, a cathedral that was blown to bits during the bombing of Dresden and painstakingly reconstructed after the reunification of Germany, to open back up in 2005. The original plans for the church from the 1720s were used, and as many of the original stones were used as possible - roughly 3,800. We didn't take any pictures during the service, but we noticed a charred, malformed cross to the right of the pulpit. We read later that it used to top the Frauenkirche, and the bombs had heated it to over 1,000 degrees.

The darker stones are the originals

An excavation was occurring near the church. Apparently, scads of Communist concrete block had been removed and archaeologists were doing a dig of the original cellars

The bombing of Dresden, in mid-February, 1945, created a horrific firestorm that covered over 13 square miles. The majority of the roughly 25,000 deaths were civilian. The protocol and casualties weren't any different than in cities like Cologne or Hamburg, but Dresden sticks out more... maybe because it wasn't a military stronghold, or maybe because it was a particularly beautiful cultural center that was reduced to rubble in the final weeks of the war.

I've long been a fan of Kurt Vonnegut and wanted to see the real Slaughterhouse 5 from his book with the same moniker. Vonnegut was an American POW doing forced labor in Dresden at the time of the bombing and survived by taking shelter in a meat locker. Interestingly enough, the slaughterhouse is nearly impossible to find. We patched together accounts we read on the internet and headed off into an area that is now a modern convention center of sorts, only accessible by one infrequent tram. Alas, the gates to the convention center area were locked, as it was a holiday weekend. Supposedly there's a sign or plaque inside. We wandered to nearby dilapidated buildings.

So it goes.

Cold steel-and-glass gates

Near where the slaughterhouses once stood

"32 children", on one of the old buildings

From the city of Dresden's website, www.dresden.de:
Founded on the site of a Slavonic fishing village as a merchants' settlement and the seat of the local rulers, Dresden was from the 15th century onwards residence of the Saxon dukes, electoral princes and later kings.
The city has experienced both splendid eras and times of tragedy. It was above all during the 18th century a magnificent centre of European politics, culture and economic development, only to become a synonym for apocalyptic destruction just two centuries later.

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HistoryAndBeer Tour 2014: Žatec and Colditz

A leaky, grey drizzle trailed us on leg 2 of our tour, north to the beer hops capital of Žatec and then the POW castle-prison, Colditz, in Germany. The Rough Guide to the Czech and Slovak Republics was a gloomy source of information yet again, noting North Bohemia's "smog levels", "opencast mines", and "brown-coal-burning power stations". We just wanted to shoot through the area quickly.

However, we were quite smitten by the countryside, with its blaze-yellow rapeseed fields and red-roofed villages snuggled into an endlessly undulating landscape of emerald green. We uncovered two reasons for this: A) The Czech Republic has engaged an environmental cleanup of the area, and B) we hadn't entered the worst of the polluted and traumatized coal-mining region, nicknamed the "Black Triangle". 

So the damper on the drive wasn't the weather or coal mines; it was the peculiar Czech radio stations that alternated between 2 Chainz, Phil Collins and techno-house music. 

Parting a sea of rapeseed

BEER:

BW researched Žatec for its hop-growing prowess; it produces the famed Saaz hops that flavor Pilsner Urquell, Stella Artois, Red Hook, and a number of other beers. We saw acres of tall hops trellises (they're a climbing plant), took a few photos and stopped for a rainy lunch in the quiet town square, where we also tried the local pils.

Zatec's plague column; cities across Europe have these columns to commemorate those killed by the Black Death in the 17th century

A church flanked by statues

BW in front of a hops trellis; they climb as tall as the poles

The Zatec brewery

Our lunch: 2 beers, frankfurter soup, chicken stuffed with broccoli, potato pancakes and spaghetti with cheese... for just under $10

HISTORY:

Our major history stop was further north at Colditz, which has a Renaissance castle that served as a high-security POW camp during WWII for Allied officers who had repeatedly escaped from other camps. A museum in the castle detailed the different ways the crafty prisoners tried to break out, from tunneling behind a toilet to building a camera by hand to make false IDs and more...

The imposing Colditz Castle

Dozens of pictures showed escapees and their schemes; a man was hired to photograph them so they could be shared with guards at other camps. On the left, a prisoner devised a costume to look like the facility's electrician. He almost made it out. On the right, a French officer spent month sewing a woman's get-up out of bedsheets; he was outside of the castle when he dropped his watch and the guards caught him because of it.

BW is underneath a model of a hang-glider that prisoners built from bedslats and bedsheets in an unknown attic space at the top of the castle. It didn't get used because 50 escapees were executed by the Gestapo and it was considered too risky. American troops found it when they liberated the castle and only one photo exists of it.

A "dummy" officer that a Dutch prisoner had his friends hold up at roll call so his "head" was counted while he attempted escape

A handmade sewing machine

The 90 m2 courtyard where prisoners exercised

A prisoner's room

An interactive map of each of the escapes from the prison can be seen HERE.

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