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4e The Second Descent into the Gates of Hell- Welcome to Spielberg
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| Castle Spilberk |
(For a visual tour, go to http://www.Špilberk.cz/?pg=zobraz&co=Špilberk-castle)
Spielberg here is not the name of a
famous director—it is the German
equivalent of the Czech Špilberk.
A tourist visiting Brno, the second
largest city of the Czech Republic, will go to the City Museum, housed in
Castle Špilberk(Spielberg). He or she will see an imposing white building,
dating back to Moravian kings in the 13th century and later rebuilt as a baroque
fortress that withstood foreign armies during the Thirty Years War. At that time
that it was first put to use as a holding tank for prisoners, first Protestant
heretics, then sympathizers of the French Revolution, fighters for Italian
freedom from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Polish dissidents in the
mid-1800’s.It became the subject of a book by Italian poet and prisoner, Silvio
Pellico, “Le Mieie Prigioni”( My Prison) and it earned the nickname “dungeon of
the nations”. By the middle of the 19th century, Kaiser Franz Josef
I shut down the prison; one century later, the German conquerors would
reestablish it as a prison for Czech patriots who had tried to resist the Nazis
( they would then be sent on to
concentration camps such a Terezin-Theresienstadt) .
