Prague unveils Holocaust memorial

PRAGUE — A monument dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust was unveiled in Prague.

Called “The Gate of No Return,” the sculpture unveiled Monday — the 71st anniversary of the mass murder of 4,000 Czech Jews in Auschwitz — is the first part of a planned remembrance site in the Czech Republic’s capital.

Some two dozen survivors attended the ceremony along with Czech officials and the ambassadors of the United States, Israel, Germany and other countries. The Czech minister of culture, Daniel Herman, unveiled the sculpture.

The monument is located at a former railway station in the Bubny district, where tens of thousands of Czech Jews were herded onto trains between 1941 and 1945 and deported to the Terezin concentration camp. Most were later murdered in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

Toman Brod, 86, was forced to board one of the trains in July 1942 along with his mother and brother.

“No one knew where the trains were headed, but we all sensed the transports were fatally dangerous,” he told the Czech daily Pravo.