Praha-Bubny is a railway station in the Holešovice area. It rises in particular in the area of ​​what was a fishing village until the mid-twentieth century.

The first Prague train with the sad task of deporting Jews to concentration camps left on October 16, 1941 from the railway station of Praha-Bubny. In the following years, 50,000 Jews from Prague were sent to ghettos and concentration and extermination camps.

After the liberation, the Germans in Prague departed from this station when they were expelled from Czechoslovakia.

Also for this reason, Praha-Bubny has now become a monument that evokes the complex history of the twentieth century and a space for discussion and critical reflection on the recent past.

Construction of the railway station began in 1866, with the creation of the line connecting Masarykovo nádraží to Buštěhrad, near Kladno. The station area also included a large railway depot, with workshops and a heating system. The premises could accommodate up to 140 wagons and included a painting section and a sawmill.

In 2004 the station area was declared a cultural monument of the Czech Republic. In 2008 it was decided to reduce thee protected status to a smaller area. Subsequently, the landowner (the Orco construction company), in collaboration with the development firm CPI Property Group, requested and obtained that further buildings lost their status of protected cultural asset. Finally, the joint venture presented the reconstruction and development plan for the entire area, which included the demolition of the station.

Prague Bubny could be refurbished as part of a possible rail link between Prague airport and the city center.

The municipality of Prague 7, along with many citizens and other representatives of the capital, opposed the demolition. There was also no shortage of proposals for the recovery of the area, which included keeping the workshop or transforming it into a museum or concert hall.

Sadly though, the owner and developer pushed for demolition, which began in September 2015 after five years of back and forth, and lasted for three months. The joint venture explained that the buildings were in such a desperate condition that it would not have been realistic to save them. However, Orco and CPI ensured that the spirit of the site would not disappear anyway: the pivotal architectural elements of the industrial construction would be preserved and incorporated into the future form of the project.

To date, of the whole complex only the main station building from 1923 remains, together with a few other smaller buildings owned by the Czech railways, which the client promised to incorporate into the future construction.

However, the entire brownfield is covered by privatization constraints, which prevent the developer from any new construction. The exemption from the constraint was granted only to the Memorial of Silence (“Památník ticha“).

The author of the reconstruction project to revitalize the railway station is Šárka Malá, while the executor of the works is the NGO “Památník Šoa Praha” (Memorial of the Holocaust in Prague). The latter entered into an agreement with the Czech railways for the 50-year lease of the station building. The project aims not only to revitalize the Praha-Bubny railway station, but also to create a permanent center of the future Memorial of Silence. The center should include seasonal exhibitions and events for the public.

The Aleš Veselý memorial

In 2015, a sculpture called “Irreversible Door” (Brána nenávratna), by the sculptor Aleš Veselý, was inaugurated in the area outside the main building. It is a twenty-meter platform raised to the sky, located in front of the station directly on the road that the Jews crossed before boarding the deportation trains. The inauguration date of this installation recalls the night between the 8 and 9 March 1944, when almost 4,000 prisoners of the Terezín family camp were exterminated.

In the front part of the station there are other installations always developed according to the same theme. The memorial opened to the public in the fall of 2018.

Every year in October, to commemorate the first deportation of Jews from Prague, the Silence Memorial Association organizes a series of events called “Bubnování pro Bubny” (Drumming for Bubny). These are concerts, discussions and exhibitions aimed at not forgetting what happened. The association also aims to stimulate reflection on our society, in which, unfortunately, the stereotypes underlying xenophobia and hatred of the different are still present nowadays.

The drumming expresses the breaking of the silence that was an accomplice to the extermination. That silence of the majority of citizens who did not intervene to stop the deportation.

It is only possible to visit the inside of the station building during the two weeks of events. For the rest of the year it is closed to the public, but you can have a look at the sculptures and external installations.