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Current AffairsCzech premiere of Song of Terezin marks Holocaust Remembrance Day
Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked around Europe on January 27, the
anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Here in Prague
the day has been marked by the country's first ever performance of the
Song of Terezin, an oratorio written by the German-American composer Franz
Waxman which is based on poems written by children imprisoned at the
Terezin ghetto (known in German as Theresienstadt). The performance,
co-sponsored by Czech and Austrian agencies, took place on Tuesday
afternoon at the State Opera. A day before the premiere I spoke to Tomas
Jelinek, the chairman of Prague's Jewish Community, and began by asking
him how the idea of putting on the first Czech performance of the Song of
Terezin had come about.
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WitnessJuraj Szanto: teenage memories of Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest
Juraj Szanto is a medical journalist, and has had a long career in Prague
as a dentist. He originally comes from the part of southern Slovakia that
was annexed by Hungary just before the Second World War. When the war
broke out, his father was sent to the Russian Front and his mother was
imprisoned in Budapest for her links with the resistance. Juraj was
fifteen when his mother was released in 1944, but this was just the time
when the Nazis began to transport Hungarian Jews to the death camps in the
east. Juraj and his mother were among thousands of people in the city who
found refuge in the Swedish Embassy, under the protection of the now
legendary Raoul Wallenberg. Here Juraj remembers not just Wallenberg, but
also other Swedish diplomats in Budapest, who helped to save tens of
thousands of lives, including his own:
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ArtsArts news, presentation of Czech Culture in Budapest
In this week's edition of the Arts, Dita Asiedu we'll be looking at a
presentation of Czech culture that is part of the International Cultural
Festival of Candidate Countries to the EU currently taking place in
Budapest, and two exhibitions in Prague that have been extended due to
public interest...
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Current AffairsA detective story: a school project to find Jewish children rescued from Prague in 1939
Many Radio Prague listeners will be familiar with the story of Sir Nicholas
Winton, the British man in Prague who managed to save 669 Jewish children
at the beginning of the Nazi occupation in 1939, by getting them visas to
Britain. For nearly 50 years, Sir Nicholas - now 94 - told no-one about
what he'd done, not even his own wife. When the story finally emerged, it
was made into an award-winning film called "The Power of Good".
A DVD of the film has just been released for schools, containing more than
an hour of extra material which could help to track down four hundred of
Sir Nicholas's "children" whose fate since their rescue has
remained unknown. David Vaughan has been speaking to the film's director,
Matej Minac, and also two of the people Nicholas Winton rescued - Eva
Krusinova and Alice Klimova, about the project, which aims to involve
Czech schoolchildren in the hunt.
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WitnessJiri Brady - my first introduction to religious education
In the Czech countryside there is a tradition that each family slaughters a
pig once or twice a year, and lives on the meat for much of the time in
between. Although they were Jewish, the Brady family, who ran the general
stores in the little town of Nove Mesto na Morave, were no exception.
Until the arrival of Hitler, they never felt any different from their
neighbours and had never shown much interest in religion. Nothing in their
lives prepared them for the horror of what was to come with the
occupation. The entire family was murdered in the camps, and Jiri Brady,
who was thirteen when he was sent to the Terezin ghetto, was the only one
to survive the Holocaust. Here he remembers back to the days before the
Germans arrived, and with humour recalls his first introduction to
religious education.
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Czech MusicFritz Weiss and a series of miraculous wartime jazz recordings
Prague's Jewish Museum recently released a CD that is nothing short of
miraculous. At the height of the Nazi occupation of Prague during the
Second World War, the Czech Jewish jazz musician, Fritz Weiss, made nearly
thirty recordings with the Emil Ludvik Orchestra. Weiss was musical leader
of the band and also made all the arrangements. Amazingly, he continued to
work with the band even after he was sent to the Terezin ghetto. In Encore
today, we'll be telling the story of these extraordinary swing recordings,
made literally in the shadow of the swastika.
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Current AffairsCzechs mark 65th anniversary of Munich Agreement
It's 65 years today since the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy
gathered in Munich to sign a document which would have lasting
consequences not only for Czechoslovakia but also the whole of Europe.
Under the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia's German-speaking border
regions were sliced off and handed to Nazi Germany, in what has been
described as one of the greatest betrayals of the 20th century. Rob
Cameron looks back at Munich 1938.
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WitnessJosef Skrabek - tragi-comedy in the Sudetenland in October 1938
Sixty-five years ago, at the beginning of October 1938, the Nazis marched
into the Czech border regions, known as the Sudetenland. With the Munich
Agreement at the end of September the British and French governments had
notoriously given Hitler the green light to annex these mainly
German-speaking areas. Overnight this had a huge impact on millions of
Czechoslovak citizens. At the time Josef Skrabek was ten years old, and
lived in the village of Valec in the heart of the Sudetenland. His father
was Czech and his mother German, one of many mixed families in the region,
for whom the events of 1938 were a painful blow. Here Josef Skrabek
remembers a tragi-comic episode as the village was waiting for the German
army to arrive.
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WitnessJosef Krettek: a pair of football boots and the Second World War
Josef Krettek lives in the little village of Bolatice, near the town of
Hlucin. People here call the area "Prajsko" - Prussia. They do
so because "Prajsko" - as part of Silesia - belonged to Prussia
for nearly 200 years. But after the First World War, Silesia was carved
up, and a small piece of it - Prajsko - was sliced off and given to the
newly-emerged state of Czechoslovakia. Twenty years later, Nazi Germany
marched in and snatched it back, and made the area's Czech-speaking
inhabitants German citizens. As a result, Josef Krettek and thousands of
other young Czech men were forced to join the German army. Josef Krettek -
now in his eighties - remembers his time as a Wehrmacht soldier - and a
much treasured pair of football boots...
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