Beckov Hrad

First, this place was a stark reminder of the struggle of Jews in the Diaspora.

Also, it was an awe-inspiring castle clinging to a wonderfully colored rock formation surrounded by rolling green hills at the base of the Lesser Carpathian mountain range near the Czech-Slovak border.

With respect to the first point, the Jewish cemetery adjoining the castle complex is merely the latest example of my growing awareness of the ongoing hatred of the Jews throughout Europe; particularly in the central European countries.

As the evidence piles up, I'm left feeling a tremendous amount of shame for the human race in general. This past weekend was full of cultural and natural beauty, but garnished with revolting reminders of the despicable deficiencies of the global human spirit. In the shadows of this magnificent castle was an appalling assemblage of annihilated gravestones and burials, some of which had actually been eerily exhumed and their contents removed or scattered about the surrounding area.

The gravestones that bore inscriptions in Hebrew were the most molested:

Some of the older less sophisticated headstones were just ripped right out of the ground:

As my stomach turned and the clouds covered then uncovered the sun sending random bursts of sunshine across the hills illuminating grisly scene after grisly scene, I awkwardly placed stones on top of the few intact graves to honor the deceased hoping to bring some element of peace to their tortured afterlives.

YMCA: "The color of a person's skin reveals only one thing. The color of a person's skin."

Bob Dylan: "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?"