A Collection of Small Monuments and Memorials from the Děčín Region

They say that every writer really only writes one book. It’s a bit of a cliché, but there’s a lot of truth to it.
When we mention the name Natálie Belisová—and not just among true connoisseurs—Bohemian Switzerland automatically comes to mind. And it’s no wonder.
According to the book database, she has written and published eighteen titles, all connected to this region, and some of them have already become truly iconic.
Take, for example, the book To the Wanderers of Jetřichovice.

Last year, just before the end of the year, another book was published—A Collection of Memorials and Forgotten Monuments from the Děčín Region—and it’s safe to say it will take pride of place on the bookshelves of connoisseurs.
The title alone hints at what the book is about; yet the breadth and depth with which this phenomenon is presented to the reader are all the more surprising.

The short stories are divided into two sections—Misfortune Doesn’t Roam the Mountains, It Roams Among People and Places of Strange Deaths—and even the chapter titles leave no doubt as to what lies ahead.
Falls, Freezing to Death, When There’s a Celebration, Heads Roll, The Scourge of Humanity, or Alcoholics, Family Tragedies, In the Footsteps of Suicides…

At first glance, it reads like the plot of a decent horror movie. And in a way, it is a horror story—and in another way, it isn’t.
Natálie Belisová doesn’t tell us scary stories just to shock us. Her goal is to bring us closer to a history that is sometimes distant, sometimes disturbingly close, to shed light on the conditions in which our ancestors lived and died here, and to show how they coped with the ever-present threat of death.

Every tourist, hiker, or traveler exploring our region inevitably comes across numerous monuments and memorials. They are a silent message from our ancestors: we lived here, we suffered, but we did not give up and carried on.

When I write about “our ancestors,” I am, to a certain extent, taking some artistic license. For the past few centuries, the German population has predominated here, and we have—more or less understandably—adopted a hostile attitude toward them, especially after World War II. This makes it all the more valuable that today, nearly a century later, we have researchers who have embraced the history of this region, made it their own, and tell stories that touch us, even if unintentionally.

The book A Collection of Memorials and Forgotten Monuments from the Děčín Region was published by the Regional Museum in Děčín. It is a lovely publication, meticulously and beautifully produced—and as you read it, you can’t help but reflect on how exhaustive and endless the work must have been that went into its publication.

Hundreds of hours in the archives—phew. Not everyone can do that.

If this publication has caught your interest, don’t wait too long to get your hands on a copy. The print run was apparently not particularly large.