Vienna had felt like a corset; Prague was a reliquary.
I moved through the Old Town as though inside a display case, glass walls pressing in on every side. The city had not been destroyed like Warsaw or Berlin; it had been embalmed. Every gothic arch, every secessionist curve gleamed too clean, as if polished for inspection. Even the Astronomical Clock ticked too smoothly, its dials newly refitted with brass. The saints still turned, but beside them the Reich’s eagle now spread its wings — a parody of eternity.
The Jewish Quarter was the most chilling. Streets once crowded with lives, with voices, now stood silent. The synagogues were preserved in amber, guarded by SS patrols as if they were holy relics. Placards in brass frames announced what each building had once been, what rituals had once taken place, as though the people themselves were no more than insects pinned beneath glass. The Reich called it a museum of a lost race. To me, it was a mausoleum.
On the Charles Bridge, gaslamps burned with cold blue filaments, their light reflected in the Vltava. Automaton sentries stood at intervals, their mirrored visors watching, their steam-valves sighing into the night like weary beasts. Tourists in Wehrmacht uniforms lingered there, pointing at the castle lit in red floodlights, praising the order, the preservation. They did not see the shadows that lingered beneath the arches. But I did.
Prague Castle rose above the city, its spires bristling with antennae and zeppelin moorings. The Reichsprotektor’s offices glowed within, calculating machines humming like hives. From that height, Prague was meant to appear eternal, orderly, German. But from the alleys below, I heard another rhythm: the rustle of coded pamphlets, the whisper of music played slightly off-tempo, the flicker of eyes that refused to lower.
In a café off the Old Square, I sat with my gloves folded, watching steam curl from a brass samovar. An officer read a newspaper, its headline declaring: Prag — Das Ewige Herz des Reiches. The violinist in the corner played a waltz, but slowed, his bow dragging across the strings just a fraction longer than the score required. A signal. A breath of resistance, woven into music that only the trained would hear.
Prague was beautiful, yes. Too beautiful. It was beauty strangled into stillness, beauty displayed behind glass, beauty meant to remind the Reich of its triumph. But I knew better. Beauty behind glass can be shattered.
And in that shattering, Prague would breathe again.
