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Current AffairsOne of last surviving Czech WWII airmen Jan “Fighter” Wiener dies at 90
Jan Wiener, a hero of World War II, has died in Prague at the age of 90. Mr
Wiener fought with Britain’s RAF before, like many of his peers, being
imprisoned by the Communists after the war. Charismatic and a wonderful
storyteller, he had in recent times been sharing his remarkable experiences
with today’s young generation. More
Czech BooksExecuting justice in the retributions after WWII
Czechoslovakia was one of the first victims of the Nazis, with the march
into the Sudetenland in I938 followed by the occupation of the rest of the
country in March 1939 and an increasingly oppressive regime for most of the
population. The backlash at the end of WWII was harsh and violent. And that
backlash against the Nazi occupiers, Sudeten Germans and Czechs believed to
have collaborated in some way is the subject of US historian Benjamin
Frommer’s book “National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi
Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia.” More
Current AffairsDocumentaries, discussions bring to life recent history for Czech students
An unusual history project is running in Czech schools throughout November,
organised by the NGO People in Need. For the next few weeks, around 700
secondary schools across the country will be showing documentary films
about the nation’s communist past, as well as inviting former political
prisoners to come and talk to children about their experiences of being
persecuted by the state. More
ArtsDuo win top Czech documentary prize with film on women from both sides of mining divide
Coal in the Soul by Martin Dušek and Ondřej Provazník last weekend won
the main prize at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, the
leading event of its kind in the Czech Republic. The original Czech title
translates literally as Women of the North Bohemian Brown Coal Mining
District, pointing to the film’s central theme: two women with
diametrically opposing viewpoints on whether a small town named Horní
Jiřetín should be razed to the ground to allow mining to continue in the
area. More
Current AffairsProject in which students map war-time fates of Jews in their locality marks ten years
For a decade now, Czech teenagers have been doing research into the fates
of Jewish people who lived in their localities before, during and after
World War II, as part of a project entitled “Neighbours Who
Disappeared”. Organisers say participants at schools around the country
have learned valuable lessons, and unearthed a lot of previously unknown
information. More
Czech BooksSidra Noach, a novel about Prague’s Jewish community in the time of floods
In the summer of the 2002, Prague was hit by one of the worst floods in the
city’s history. The swollen Vltava inundated parts of the historic
centre, including the Jewish quarter, which had to be evacuated. This
dramatic scene is the setting for the new Czech novel Sidra Noach by David
Jan Novotný. The name comes from the weekly readings from the scripture.
As it happened, the story of Noah was read in the synagogue just as the
waters began to recede.
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