Watchtower From Pribram Prison Camp, on Display in Malostranska, Prague, CZ, 2009

For the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, a number of artifacts from Communist rule were brought to Prague for public display, and this included a number of guard towers from the concentration camps that the Communist regime operated. This has in fact not been the first time that these have been displayed, as most years around November 17th (the date chosen for the official anniversary, even though in fact the revolution took several days) different exhibits commemorate the victims of the camps. Pribram is the best remembered, although I'm not aware of how many people died there. It was a forced labour camp specialising in uranium mining (or so I've been told), making it allegedly one of the most deadly. There is somewhat of a dearth of information available on Pribram in English, although I do intend to dig deeper to see what I can find. Generally, these camps were overshadowed by the infamous gulags of the Soviet Union, both because the gulags killed more people and because the most famous Czech dissidents were actually not imprisoned in Pribram or any of the camps. Most of them, most notably Vaclav Havel and Milada Horakova, instead ended up in Pankrac prison, which still operates today.