(1 Dec 2015) Dealing with the dark legacy of the Holocaust, a small team has been working to rehabilitate a Jewish cemetery in the eastern Czech Republic city of Prostejov that was destroyed during the country's Nazi occupation in World War II.
The discovery was a result of efforts to find at least some of almost 2,000 tombstones that were desecrated and disappeared more than 70 years ago.
German Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust and didn't even let those already dead rest in peace, as dozens of Jewish cemetery were eradicated.
Prostejov had for centuries been the most significant Jewish community in the eastern part of the country known as Moravia together with Olomouc and Mikulov.
The local Jews used the cemetery for burials from 1801 till the beginning of the 20th century.
After the transport of nearly all the town Jews to concentration camps and then when the roughly 200 who survived the Holocaust left the country, the cemeteries days were numbered said Marie Dokoupilova, a historian at the local museum.
Today, there's less than a dozen Jews living in Prostejov.
"In 1942 most of the local Jewish residents were transported to Terezin (concentration camp) and later to death camps and then German authorities acquired the piece of land and started to liquidate the Jewish Cemetery. The tombstones were desecrated and taken to no one knows where," said Dukoupilova.
Dokoupilova, who wrote the only Czech study about the site, said all 1,924 tombstones were desecrated likely in 1943 and no documents are available to clarify their fate.
Due to a lack of information, the search for something that disappeared in the war looked impossible.
After they published a note about the project in a local newspaper, however, there was hope.
They didn't have to wait long for responses from people who began to call with information about the stones they either have in their homes or provide tips on where they could be found.
Since the project kicked off in July, leader Tomas Jelinek and his collaborators have traced about 150 tombstones, or in most cases at least some pieces of the tombstones.
The preserved plans and details about the cemetery, including the record of the inscriptions at the archive of Prague's Jewish Museum, make it possible to identify those they belonged to, and consequently, their current relatives can get an unexpected chance to rediscover their families' past.
In a recent discovery, a whole backyard of a house in Prostejov is paved by around 50 big stone blocks.
Today, it is a public park where the local residents walk their dogs.
While Jelinek hopes that more tombstones will reappear after the initial successful results are published, the attention now turns to the actual cemetery site.
The hope is to come to an arrangement so the remains of the buried can be honoured.
In December, a new design for the site will be presented to local authorities.
Meanwhile, negotiations have been going on for the cemetery to receive a status of a national heritage site.
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