Pinkas Synagogue

This guide to the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, its walls painted with the names of nearly eighty thousand Czech and Moravian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, opens in 1968, when officials abruptly padlocked the memorial and blamed the damp. It goes back to painters Václav Boštík and Jiří John, who spent much of the 1950s copying those names by hand, community by community, from transport papers and ghetto registers. The names run husbands beside wives and children beneath parents, grouped by the town each family once called home.