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Current Affairs Holocaust survivors gather in Kolin to remember "special transport"
The brutal reprisals for the assassination 60 years ago of the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia - Reinhardt Heydrich - are well known. Two villages - Lidice and Lezaky - were razed to the ground, their inhabitants shot or sent to concentration camps. But almost unknown is the fact that 1,000 Jews from the town of Kolin were rounded up and transported to the camps, never to be seen again. A handful were spared that "special" transport, among them the writer Hana Greenfield, who was later sent to Terezin, Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. This weekend she will join a group of 40 Jews from six congregations around the world, who will gather in Kolin to remember the dead.
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WitnessHana Greenfield - lucky to be alive?
In 1942 Hana Lustigova, now Greenfield, was a teenager in the town of Kolin, east of Prague. Along with her mother and sister, she was sent by the Nazis to the Terezin Jewish Ghetto. This was just after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who had ruled occupied Bohemia and Moravia with unsurpassed brutality. Hana, with her mother and sister, only narrowly avoided being sent straight to the gas chambers of the East among 1000 other Czech Jews, sent as a so-called Punishment Transport in retaliation for Heydrich. That was sixty years ago this week. Although her mother was murdered in Auschwitz, Hana survived. By a tragic irony, it is quite likely that the Cyklon B gas that killed her mother and millions of other European Jews was manufactured in Hana Greenfield's hometown of Kolin. She is sometimes asked if she feels lucky to be alive. Here is her response. More
Witness Zuzana Ruzickova on the power of music
And now for the first in our new weekly mini-series, in which David Vaughan lets people speak for themselves. People who have experienced moments of drama, excitement or tragedy at first hand recount a single, unforgettable episode in their lives. In the first of the series, we go back to the dark days of World War Two.
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Current AffairsFilming at Terezin banned following porn film outrage
A strict ban on video and film cameras was introduced on Monday at the Czech Republic's Terezin memorial, in response to claims in a tabloid newspaper that a porn actor-producer was planning to use the former concentration camp as the setting for his latest erotic film. The Czech tabloid Super claimed on Saturday that porn star Robert Rosenberg was working on a new film called "The Way It Was," featuring shots of SS officers having sex with female prisoners. Unsurprisingly, Terezin's mayor as well as groups representing former political prisoners are outraged. has more.
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Magazine"Lost Neighbours" project
Among the many ads in today's newspapers and magazines is one that many readers will doubtless find intriguing. "Help us search for your lost neighbours" reads the caption beneath a set of faded, pre-war photographs. The "lost neighbours" in question are the thousands of Jews who were gassed or simply disappeared without a trace in the Holocaust. Although the process of establishing a data base has been going on for years -mostly based on information provided by Jews who survived the Holocaust- now the Jewish Museum in Prague has appealed to the broad public to help piece together the history of Jews in the Czech Republic and help give their "long lost neighbour" a face. Find out more in this week's Magazine. More
