Going from Amsterdam to Prague and back, it’s hard to avoid the history of the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because the house where were staying is just two blocks from the Anne Frank House. Or maybe it’s just that the history of the Jews in Europe, the diaspora that Hitler tried to end, is so thick beneath your feet. Like blood on the tracks.

I had always wanted to go to Prague, or at least since I was 13 during the Prague Spring and Life magazine was filled with pictures of Czech hippies with their fingers held aloft in a peace signs. And then reading Kundera all those years later, and even seeing Stoppard’s Rock ‘n Roll, made me romanticize the place. It became a cool destination after the Velvet Revolution put Havel in the driver’s seat, if only for a while.

The reality was a little colder and darker than my Alan Furst-drenched fantasy. Turns out the movie of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for instance, was shot elsewhere and remans a source of comedy for Prague’s citizens. Renata, the woman we had dinner with the first night there, told me that Kundera himself was somewhat controversial. He still lived in France, all these years later, and even wrote in French. His books had to be translated into his native language.

In the Czech Republic, nothing is black and white,  she told me as I ate my duck and sauerkraut. Her mother’s family was killed in the Holocaust. Her father was later jailed by the Communists. She visited him each month in prison for ten years and he encouraged her to join the Party so that she might someday work as a journalist, as she hoped to. But she was allowed into the university in 1968 because of her father’s reputation, not in spite of it: The academics all admired him for going to jail. And a  year after she arrived, the people who accepted her were out of power at the university. If I had gone a year before or a year after, I would not have gotten in, she said.

Josefov, the site of the former Jewish Ghetto, is a small part of the old city; it was walled off from the rest of Prague for hundreds of years to keep the Jewish population out — and sometimes to protect them from the Christians’ ritual pogroms and blood libels. When the Nazis captured the city they forced the Jews to reside there again, while looting their art and holding it in the neighborhood’s synagogues. Today those buildings house some of that art — and the names of the tens of thousands of Czech Jews killed in the camps.

Hitler wanted to make a museum of Jewish culture right there himself: That’s right, after obliterating an entire people he thought it would be nice to make a little memorial to them. (This is one of the many reasons Hitler still holds the gold medal in evil and why comparing any other despot or madman to him is so unfair.) He didn’t have chance to see his museum.

Instead we have the Anne Frank House.