It was there for five hundred years.
Then she disappeared, and today nobody knows where the “Madonna under the orange tree” from the St. Barbara chapel of the Czech castle Grabštejn - in German Grafenstein - has gone.
It seems certain that none of the Count's Clam-Gallas family, who were expropriated and expelled in 1945, had the opportunity to carry a Lucas Cranach away under their coat in order to hang it on the wall again in Vienna.
Today there is a copy in the chapel: The baby Jesus on Mary's lap reaches out for an orange that naked boys have shaken out of the tree.
Wherever the two of them are today, and whoever furtively feasts on the original, the Madonna is one of the easier to bear victims of the Second World War, which left a trace of unspeakable suffering in the border triangle of the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland. Northern Bohemia with the Czech regions of Ústí and Liberec was and is a dreamy, curved landscape full of meadows, vineyards, sunflower fields and black fields, lined with the forested crests of extinct volcanoes and interspersed with small towns, which tradition and lack of industry have left town centers with Gothic stepped gables . Yes - the gray-gray edges, the prefabricated buildings, the walled-up windows, the chipped plaster, they are there too. But the past is gothic, baroque or imperial yellow.None of the castle guides, who show us aristocratic residences in the Bohemian Central Uplands for three days, utter the word Sudetenland, not even the word concentration camp.
Sixty tons of bread a day
We get to know Theresienstadt - Terezín - as one of the largest fortress structures in the world, built in 1790 by the Austrian Emperor Josef II against attacks from the north, over one thousand three hundred and fifty hectares in size, an entire city behind jagged bastions, impregnable, never really overrun, two hundred years ago “Super modern,” says Jiří Hofman, a young man who researches fortress construction. We stand with him for a long time at the intersection of two underground passages. The candles in the mine lanterns flicker, these brick-built mine passages are thirty-four kilometers long, perfect booby traps; the fortress was also enclosed by trenches that could be flooded through the Eger if necessary. These dimensions! The entire Austrian army could receive medical care from Theresienstadt.The bakery delivered sixty tons of bread a day.
Hofman regrets that the state is spending a lot of money on the memorial for the concentration camp in the small fortress, which is outside the bastion and beyond the cemetery for the victims, but cannot spare any money for the fortress.
We take the bus quickly through the city, the former ghetto, transit camp for tens of thousands of Jews on the way to Auschwitz and Treblinka, "the stable in front of the slaughterhouse", as Ruth Klüger called Theresienstadt.
Until 2000, before the Czech military withdrew, Terezín was a commune with eight thousand inhabitants and fifty-two pubs.
One is left in a dusty ghost town with closed shutters, broken roofs and empty parks - nothing you want to show travelers to the bohemian castles first.