When walking through the town of Terezin, what hit hardest wasn’t just the scale of suffering but the endurance of it; people holding on not only for themselves but for the people they loved, with no visible end in sight. That kind of strength is hard to wrap your head around, especially in this day and age. It’s almost painful to know that people didn’t believe atrocities like this were happening back in the day because we as people couldn’t believe that someone could be that cruel.
Standing near Milada Horáková’s memorial in the little fortress, I kept thinking about the fact that she tried to defend herself at trial. Not because she expected to win, but because she believed a just system was worth appealing to. That’s the principle, unbroken even after everything she’d already survived. Especially after knowing she would go through two totalitarian governments, it puts her work into perspective. She’s inspired many, and she will continue to inspire countless today
The last thing I didn’t expect to notice today: how much the people you travel with matter. On a heavy day like this, hearing how someone beside you processes the same memorial, the same stories, changes what you take away. Some experiences need to be shared to be fully understood.
Prague carries beauty and grief in the same streets, and today, we walked both.
Swanson School of Engineering 