Jewish cemetery in Volary

The Jewish cemetery in Volary is one of the most sobering memorial sites in the Šumava region — a small, quiet plot on the edge of town that commemorates victims of a 1945 death march. Unlike most historic Jewish cemeteries in the Czech Republic, this one did not grow out of a local Jewish congregation: Volary itself had virtually no Jewish community, with only a single Jewish resident recorded in the 1930 census. The cemetery instead emerged from the tragedy of the war's final days.

How did this burial site come to exist?

In May 1945, just after the fighting in Europe ended, a mass grave was discovered near Volary. It held the bodies of Jewish women and girls who had died during the evacuation death march from Helmbrechts, a subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp system, itself connected to the wider network of camps around Grünberg and Auschwitz. The prisoners — Polish, Hungarian, Soviet, and Czechoslovak women — died over the course of a roughly 700-kilometer march, succumbing to starvation and exhaustion or shot when they could no longer continue. Under the supervision of Herman Dicker, the Jewish chaplain of the U.S. Army's 5th Infantry Division, local German civilians were made to exhume the mass grave and rebury the victims with dignity. On 22 May 1945, 95 women and one man — a Soviet victim of the Nazis — were laid to rest at the site.

What makes this cemetery different from other memorial sites?

The Volary cemetery holds a distinction unique in Europe: it is the only known Holocaust burial site where the victims' names appear individually on their gravestones. At most massacre sites and mass graves, victims remain anonymous, honored only by a collective plaque or monument. Here, each of the 96 flat marble headstones — in a style typical of the mid-20th century — bears a specific name, restoring an identity that the war had tried to erase. The stones still stand in their original positions from the 1945 burial.

How did the site's status change after the war?

For decades under communist rule, the site did not carry the full formal recognition of a Jewish cemetery; it functioned more as a symbolic burial ground for war victims. Only with the political changes of 1989–1990 in Czechoslovakia, and the renewed freedom to commemorate Holocaust victims openly, did the site gain lasting recognition and care as a symbolic Jewish cemetery.

Why is it worth visiting?

This is not a place that draws visitors with grand architecture or scale — it is modest and understated. Its power lies in its history and in the gesture behind it: giving names back to victims where history tried to strip them away. A visit to the Volary cemetery offers a window into the final, brutal weeks of the war in Central Europe, when thousands of concentration camp prisoners were forced onto death marches ahead of the advancing Red Army. For travelers exploring the Šumava region, it is a stop that connects the area's landscape to the broader history of the 20th century.

Frequently asked questions

Did a Jewish community exist in Volary? No — no organized Jewish congregation existed in the town; the 1930 census recorded only one Jewish resident.

How many people are buried at the cemetery? 96 people — 95 women and girls and one man — each commemorated on an individual headstone.

Where did the victims come from? Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia — prisoners evacuated in the death march from the Helmbrechts subcamp.

What makes this site so distinctive? It is the only known Holocaust cemetery in Europe where the victims' names, rather than anonymous markers, appear on individual gravestones.