Section Archive Witness
Pride and joy on winning Olympic Gold
Katerina Tepla is one of the Czech Republic's foremost athletes. At the winter Paralympics in Nagano four years ago, the 29-year-old downhill skier came home with no less than four medals, three gold and one silver, and became a household name overnight.
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Hana 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
Politics and Tragedy in the Mountains
We've chosen the following memory for this series, not just because it's a dramatic tale of the dangers of the mountains - taking place in the Krkonose Mountains that straddle the Czech-Polish border - but also because of the insight the story gives into the way that politics can permeate all aspects of our lives. Herbert Berger from the mountain rescue service in Pec pod Snezkou tells us about the worst avalanche in Krkonose in living memory.
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Erstwhile enemies meet behind bars
This week is the anniversary of the Prague Uprising, which began on the 5th May 1945, in the last days of the German occupation of Prague. At the time Antonin Sum was in his mid twenties. As a young Czech patriot he was active in the uprising, which saw heavy street-fighting against the residue of the German army of occupation. In three days nearly three thousand people were killed. On the other side of the barricades was the German General Rudolf Toussaint, the chief of the Wehrmacht forces in Prague. After the war Antonin Sum became secretary to the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk, but with the Communist putsch of 1948, as a democrat, he became an enemy of the state more or less overnight. Like thousands of non-communist Czechs who had held positions of influence, Antonin Sum was thrown into prison during the show-trials of the later 40s and early 50s. By a strange twist of history, one-time freedom fighters found themselves in jail with former prominent Nazis and collaborators, and it was there that Antonin Sum had the strange experience of meeting his erstwhile enemy, General Toussaint. Here he remembers that meeting.
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At home yet not at home
When he was three years old, Herbert Werner and his family were expelled from Czechoslovakia. His mother was Czech but his father was German. We have heard a lot in recent weeks about the mass expulsions of Sudeten Germans after the Second World War, but Herbert Werner is unusual in that he has come back to live in the Czech Republic, after not seeing the land of his birth for over fifty years. He now lives in Prague and is one of the directors of the Czech-German Future Fund, set up to foster good relations between the two countries. Here he talks about his feelings on returning to his native Bohemia.
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Smoke from the radio - Barbara Day remembers
We often complain about the times we live in, but in Prague today we are lucky. It was only a little over three decades ago that city experienced one of the bleakest moments in its twentieth century history, as Russian tanks rolled down the cobbled streets. The author and academic Barbara Day was in Prague in 1968, having arrived as a theatre graduate on a cultural exchange programme, and she witnessed at first hand the Soviet-led invasion, on the 21st August 1968. Here, in this brief snapshot memory, she remembers looking down over the city.
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Alan Levy on the White Rabbit
The American journalist Alan Levy is editor-in-chief of the English language weekly The Prague Post. He came to Prague in 1968 at the time of the Prague Spring, and his book So Many Heroes, is one of the classic works describing the events of the time and the tragedy of the Soviet invasion that followed. In January 1971 Alan and his family were forced to leave a very different Czechoslovakia from the country they had come to three years before. Their crime, as Alan puts it, was the "sin of truth-telling". Here Alan tells the story of how he and his wife were summoned to the Foreign Ministry to be told they were no longer wanted.
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Vaclav Bartuska on why he should have been shot
In 1989 Vaclav Bartuska was a student. The Berlin Wall fell on the 9th November, and in the days that followed voices for change became ever louder in communist Czechoslovakia. As someone who already had a reputation as a dissident, Vaclav's fellow students appointed him as a student leader. The events that followed were dramatic...
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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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