The monument was made of granite from Vahlovice near Blatná, because in the Klatovy region it was impossible to find a clean block of the required size. The block weighs 9 tons and it took a second attempt to extract it in one piece. From the frontal view, the texture of the quarried stone is preserved, including the traces of cutting tools. The side walls of the monument are smooth. On the left side, the shape of one half of a seven-armed candlestick was cut out of the stone.
The right side of the monument is covered with 266 names of local Holocaust victims, arranged alphabetically, leaving out punctuation marks and spaces between each name so that the names form a continuous text. The viewer is thus confronted with a mass of names expressing the tragedy of the Jewish community as a whole. The right side of the monument faces a former synagogue building and three massive granite pieces on the ground show the way towards the synagogue. Two of the pieces serve as steps leading up to the monument, while the third piece, which is levelled with the ground and adjoins a walkway made of granite cubes, contains fragments of rails as a symbol of the transports.

יזכור

(Names)

ה' ינקם דמם

OBĚTEM HOLOKAUSTU

ROKU 2012
KU STÁLÉMU PŘIPOMNĚNÍ A VĚČNÉMU VAROVÁNÍ
MĚSTO KLATOVY

The idea to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the transport of local Jews to concentration camps by erecting a monument initiated from Dana Škůrková and František Škůrek, who inspired the then deputy mayor of Klatovy, Jiří Štancl to advocate for the monument at the municipal administration and participate in the whole process of the unveiling of the monument on 3 December 2012. Jiří Štancl also pushed for the total of 266 victims' names inscribed on the side wall of the monument. The monument itself, the concept and its positioning in the public space is the work of sculptor Václav Fiala (*1955). After the completion of the monument, Fiala also suggested to have three granite slabs added to connect the monument with the adjacent sidewalk. On the recommendation of Václav Fred Chvátal, the text on the monument starts with a Hebrew inscription meaning "Let us remember" and ends with a Hebrew inscription meaning "God will avenge their blood".
The unveiling of the monument was preceded by a ceremony attended by Chief Rabbi Karol Sidon, chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities Jiří Daníček, representatives of the municipal administration and invited guests in the hall of the Klatovy town hall. Milan Strnad, author of the book Jews in the History of Klatovy, recounted the fate of the Klatovy Jews. The participants also heard a recollection of the Klatovy synagogue by the Klatovy Jewish native, writer and poet František Gottlieb, and a recollection by Roman Catholic priest and former prior of the Premonstratensian monastery in Teplá, Josef Hugo Pitel, of his classmate and friend Arnošt Ringer from Klatovy, whose name is also inscribed on the monument.
From the town hall, the participants moved to the monument, where a speech was delivered by the mayor of the town Rudolf Salvetro, followed by Jiří Daníček. Chief Rabbi Karol Sidon unveiled the monument at 3 pm and ended his speech with a prayer for the deceased. Subsequently, the even continued at the nearby Gallery 172 on Čsl. legií Street. The attendees toasted with kosher wine and the sculptor Ales Vesely opened his exhibition entitled Ascent to the Beginning.
The task of listing the names of Holocaust victims from among the Jewish citizens of Klatovy was undertaken by the husband and wife team of Dana and František Škůreks. The authors searched several lists and databases of Holocaust victims, trying to answer two crucial questions: what was the total number of Klatovy victims and what was the exact wording of their names.
The monument contains the names of the Jewish residents deported from Klatovy at the end of 1942 by the Cd, Ce and Ez-St transports. In addition, there are also other cases, such as the Jews who were arrested as early as September 1939 and taken hostage in the so-called protective custody, or the individuals who were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, etc. Some databases included also persons who were registered in Klatovy at the time of deportation but resided elsewhere. Verification of individual data has shown that the number of these registered persons in the databases is not accurate and complete. With regard to the inaccuracy of these records and the general uncertainty about the date of registration itself, it was decided to apply the criterion of the last place of residence at the relevant time (i.e. time of deportation from Klatovy, time of arrest, or time of suicide). Persons who were only registered in Klatovy were not included. For this reason, however, the name of Eugen Löwy, a native of Klatovy and a long-time chairman of the Jewish religious community in Klatovy, who had his last residence in Poděbrady with his wife and mother-in-law from about 1939 and who was deported with his family on a transport from Kolín, is not on the monument.
As for the number of Klatovy victims, the most reliable source was a list compiled by Karel Štern, who himself survived the concentration camps. After the war, he returned to Klatovy, maintained the Jewish cemetery and worked systematically to preserve the memory of the Klatovy Jewish community, not only by compiling a list of Klatovy victims, but also by writing a memoir. His work The way we lived is available in typescript in the Klatovy museum. The list of victims drawn up by Štern, unlike other databases of victims, included not only the Jews deported from Klatovy, but also other Jewish citizens who had reached the extermination camps by other means, and were often missing in other databases. Only two persons were not mentioned in Štern's list, and another was by mistake listed as having died, although she survived. Compared to other documents, this list was clearly the most complete.
The names of Jewish citizens which appeared only in the lists from 1940, were double-checked at the District Court in Klatovy in the name registers of the inheritance files to confirm whether these people died between 1940 and 1942 (more than a dozen persons were found to have died before the Klatovy transports were dispatched).
In some cases, the inclusion of a name in the list for the monument was disputable. For example, the name of Selma Černá, who committed suicide in 1941 to protect her non-Jewish husband, is listed. On the other hand, the name of Lotta (Aloysia) Bermannová, who committed suicide in Prague on 3 April 1941, is not on the monument, because she did not meet the criterion of residing in Klatovy at the relevant time, and at the same time it could not be proven that her suicide was directly related to racial persecution.
The second problem in drawing up the list of victims was the question of the spelling of their names. The most frequent ambiguities in the case of personal names were the use of the Czech or German variant of the name (Markéta - Margot, Elsa - Eliška) or the choice of the form of one and the same name (Vilma – Vilemína – Viléma – Mina, Jan – Hanuš – Hans). Occasionally, even surnames were questionable (Eckstein - Ekstein, Fränkel - Frenkl, Sachsel - Sachsl - Saxl). These cases would have required verification in the civil registry, which was not possible due to time constraints. For these ambiguities, therefore, preference was given to the variant that appeared most frequently in the databases searched. However, if the authentic signature of a person was traced directly (as was the case in several cases in the above-mentioned list of 9 March 1940), the name was placed on the monument as in the signature (thus, we find Ella Weiner on the monument and not Ella or Elsa, or Beno Löffler and not Benedikt or Bernard).