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You can come across them on Brno’s streets, inconspicuously embedded in the pavement: a cobblestone carrying a brass plate with the name of someone who long ago lived in the house, and with their fate condensed into a few words and numbers. Already more than fifty thousand Stolpersteine or Stones of the Disappeared have been installed in nineteen countries in Europe and so in their way constitute the largest memorial in the world.

Our society is currently experiencing a state of dangerous hysteria. We will leave to one side for the moment that this tidal wave of refugees consists of only thirteen people at Prague’s main railway station and some fifteen hundred accepted Syrians to arrive gradually in the coming years. Nor will we get into the fact that the supposed Islamification takes the form of a few kebab stalls.

On Sunday August 23, 2015, a commemorative gathering took place as part of the Year of Reconciliation at the site of the concentration camp in Hodonín (near Kunštát), in remembrance of the largest transport to leave there for Auschwitz, on August 21, 1943. The event took place on a building site among bulldozers and trucks since after the closure of the recreational facility a memorial is finally being built.

While the GDR (East Germany), just like Czechoslovakia, did not allow open discussion, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) went through an unprecedented process of reflection and repentance. Despite this, or perhaps rather because of this, it is shocking that of the approximately six and a half thousand guards who served in the Auschwitz concentration camp, only some forty-three were brought before the courts in West Germany. It was only this year that the “Auschwitz Accountant” Oskar Gröning found himself on the defendant’s bench.

On the north-west edge of what is now Moravské Square but was then Lažanské Square stood the Deutsches Haus (German House), a building that inspired admiration and hatred. Its destruction marked the end of the coexistence of the two nationalities in Brno.

Violence against German-speaking inhabitants broke out immediately after the war front swept through Brno. The shocking scenes took place in the streets and especially in internment camps all around the city; the culmination of these excesses, however, was the Death March, which began on 30 May 1945. It was ordered by the Brno National Committee, where Communists played a leading role. The so-called Košice Program of the National Front, an association of the only permitted political parties in the post-war Czechoslovakia, imposed their equitable representation in national committees, but the Communists in the Brno National Committee – contrarily to the above mentioned program – occupied as many as twelve seats of thirty.