"I think that Czech anti-Semitism has fortunately never been as strong as in the surrounding countries. I consider this a great merit of Masaryk's policy, even during the Austro-Hungarian period. Just recall his role during the Hilsneriad but also during the First Republic. Back then, the anti-Semitism, the anti-Semites just didn't belong in mannerly society. They were sort of on the fringes, especially those who presented themselves openly remained on the fringes of social events. The role of these open anti-Semites during the occupation led to a great discrediting of those groups, but of course, the underbelly was not completely destroyed. And the latent anti-Semitism brought about by the indoctrination by the Soviet Union, or the Soviet Communist Party, reinforced these tendencies and caused anti-Semitism to remain alive. And the relationship to the Jewish state also played a role in that it was presented here as a thing hostile to socialism, which was actually harmful to the people of this country, to use the terminology of the time. I think if it hadn't been for that indoctrination, that anti-Semitism would have died down faster than it did. It contributed to the fact that it didn't disappear because, of course, it exists today too, although I'm still optimistic in that respect, that it doesn't reach the strength and the weight that it does in other countries."
[Was the Holocaust in Terezín even commemorated during normalization?]
"I think that is a very good question, a right one. Because there was basically no commemoration of the Holocaust. It was a great shock for me when I came to Terezin in the early 1990s, so of course, I was familiarizing myself with the area of the city. I was interested in what it looked like in the places where the ghetto itself was. There were information boards that talked about the fact that there was a concentration camp there, the prisoners suffered there, and that they were from various European countries occupied by Nazi Germany. But nowhere did I find the word Jew or Jewish. It's just as if there were no Jews at all in the places where the ghetto was. And so I was even more disturbed when I talked to people in the city and asked them what the history was like there, what they remembered and commemorated, and so on. Not only the young people but many of the older people basically didn't know that there even was a ghetto. For them, the commemoration of the Nazi occupation was always associated with the exhibition that was in the Small Fortress and the commemorative events that took place in the National Cemetery, but it was not connected with the commemoration of the Jewish ghetto."
"And I remember - of course, these are things that you never forget - that we had to sign an oath after graduating from the military graduate course that we would defend the Republic and so on. And we were on a kind of field exercise. We were in those tents. One guy came in, and he wasn't a classmate directly, but he was also a college kid our age, and he said, 'So I signed this piece of paper.' And you could see that he was terribly upset, he was terribly...., everything was stirring in him. And after about half an hour, there was a sudden bang, like a gunshot. And then we all froze. Because we'd been on live fire before, we thought somebody had left a bullet in the barrel and was now playing with it, and this is what happened. And then all of a sudden the screams and it turned out that this fellow graduate of ours had shot himself, it just shook him up, after the occupation... And by then, the normalization was already underway and so on."
"When one reads the minutes of the various meetings of the proposals and rejections of the proposals to establish a ghetto museum [in Terezín], it simply sends chills down your spine. It was the same way during the time of normalization, when, for example, there were discussions about whether or not to commemorate the Jewish victims, and they stated quite seriously that they should show this issue, but with the understanding that it must not be forgotten that the Nazis also distinguished between classes and treated rich Jews differently from poor ones. And that when we make an exhibition about the concentration camps, we must especially not forget the concentration camps in Vietnam and Israel."
Historian Vojtěch Blodig was born on 8 October 1946 in Prague. His father, Vojtěch Blodig Sr., a civil servant, participated in the Resistance during the war and was imprisoned in the concentration camps of Dachau and Bernau. Vojtěch Blodig has been interested in history since his teens, and after graduating from high school in 1964, he began studying history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In 1970, he received his doctorate after defending his thesis, The Role of the National Fascist Community in the political and power system of pre-Munich Czechoslovakia. During normalization, he worked in the documentation center of the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters, taught at the University of Economics, and taught history at high schools. From 1990 to the present day (2023), he has been working at the Terezín Memorial, where he is mainly engaged in research on the history of the Terezín ghetto. In 1992, he became deputy director of the memorial and head of its historical department. Since 2004, he has been a permanent member of the Czech delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental association for Holocaust research, commemoration, and education. He participates in the educational activities of the Terezín Memorial and has contributed significantly to the restoration of awareness of the history of the Terezín ghetto. In 2023, he was awarded the highest French state decoration - the Order of the Legion of Honour.
