One of the university’s students killed 14 people, then himself on Dec. 21.

“The level of violence that took place today at Charles University is absolutely uncharted territory and shocking for our academic community and for the Czech Republic,” Charles University officials said in a statement.

The scenes of students evacuating classrooms and running to safety felt familiar, but the cultural backdrop is different in this place my family is from. We are used to the killings. For them, this is raw.

“Is everyone okay?” I asked my mom when I heard the news of terror not far from a cousin’s workplace and in the building where my husband once took college classes.

“She’s out in the country,” my mom said. And no one else in my family was nearby.

We stayed with our plans — made months ago — to visit family in Prague right after Christmas. And our first stop was the growing memorial at the university.

It’s near an embankment of the Vltava River, the old Jewish quarter and a statue of famous composer Antonin Dvorak. This is a place of medieval towers and art deco facades, belle époque kavarnas and cobblestones.

Right outside the university steps, now covered in dripping, melting wax, is Jan Palach Square, a memorial to another Charles University student whose violent act made him infamous.

Palach’s self-immolation in 1969, in protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that ended the blossoming of the Prague Spring, is lore in our people’s history. My kids know his story and we always stop at his grave when we visit my maternal family plot a few rows away.

Some Czech journalists are refusing to print the shooter’s name and his story. They’re not visiting his hometown half an hour away to trace his steps, to piece together the murders police have linked to him — a father and a baby in the woods, then the shooter’s own father.

“I read articles about American mass shootings and I came to the conclusion that we can’t promote the shooter,” Martin Bartkovský, editor in chief of the weekly Reflex, said on Czech Radio.

At the memorial, Czechs I spoke with had little to say about the shooter.

“He was just crazy in the head,” one of them told me.

Just three months ago, when I was visiting my son at his college in New England, I was having the same conversations with strangers outside a 7-Eleven in Lewiston, Maine, after the mass killing there in October.

“Did you know any of the victims?”

“Did you know anything about the shooter?”

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