Section Archive Witness
Ivan Plicka: in the wrong place at the wrong time during "Palach Week"
It's exactly fifteen years since one of the events that accelerated the
fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. January 1989 was the 20th anniversary
of the death of Jan Palach, the student who had set himself alight on
Prague's Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet occupation. All
through the week starting from the 15th January thousands of people
gathered beneath the statue of Saint Wenceslas with flowers, to remember
Palach's sacrifice. Their quiet protest was put down by police in riot
gear using water cannon, a gross over-reaction that helped to turn many
Czechs against the regime. The young architect Ivan Plicka was a chance
witness of the demonstrations that are now known as "Palach
Week", and as he now recalls, he almost found himself being arrested.
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Radek Svatos - a man's best friend helping in earthquake-devastated Bam
Czech dog-handlers were among the first foreign rescue workers to arrive in
the Iranian city of Bam after last month's devastating earthquake. They
remained for only three days, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster,
but during that time they won a great deal of respect for their work
searching for survivors and finding the bodies of the dead. Among them was
Radek Svatos, and here he recalls some of his impressions.
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Best of Witness 2003
In the following programme we're going to be hearing some of the best from
our weekly series "Witness" from 2003. As regular listeners will
know, "Witness" is a programme where people recall a memory in
their lives. Given the nature of 20th century history, many of the
memories have been about the ability of the human spirit to survive in
adversity, but there have also been plenty of moments of humour and
romance.
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Marketa Richterova - my Romany wedding that never was
Marketa Richterova is a young actress living in Prague. In communist days
her family had huge problems with the regime. Her parents were dissidents
and the family was forced to emigrate when Marketa was a child in 1981.
Given this traumatic early experience it is not surprising that she has
since had a strong sense of understanding for other people forced for
whatever reasons to flee their home. Here she talks about how she decided
to help out a friend, when the war in Yugoslavia broke out in the early
1990s.
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Pavel Klimes - a return to a lost world
Pavel Klimes lives in the village of Pec pod Snezkou in the Krkonose
Mountains of North Bohemia. He runs a museum and information centre for
the thousands of people who visit the mountains every year. Pavel is
fascinated by the history of the region. Until World War Two the
population was almost entirely German-speaking, and when they were
expelled after the war, whole villages emptied overnight. Now Pavel is
trying to put together some of the fragments of the lost history of the
Krkonose Mountains, and part of this project is an attempt to restore some
of the neglected wayside memorials, crosses and other architectural
reminders of the region's past. Here he remembers an experience from a few
years ago, when the project was just getting under way.
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Daniel Satra - the symbolism of ice hockey for an émigré baby
Next year the Czech Republic will be hosting the ice hockey world
championships, and I hardly need remind you that ice hockey is a national
institution here. The moment remembered in this week's Witness reflects
the symbolism of the sport to many Czechs, both at home and abroad. Daniel
Satra, who recently finished studying sociology at the University of
Göttingen, was born into a Czech family that had emigrated to Germany
after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Here he remembers the first time, as a
small child in the 1970s, that he became aware of his family's Czech
identity.
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Lubomir Doruzka: a concert for Haile Selassie
Lubomir Doruzka is a living legend of Czech jazz. He has been involved in
music since the Second World War, when, as a teenager, he worked on an
illegal jazz magazine. Because he speaks fluent English he has often
accompanied musical ensembles, both jazz and classical, on tours abroad.
Here he remembers an extraordinary concert in Addis Ababa during a tour of
Africa in 1957, when the Janacek Quartet was invited to play for the
Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.
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Eliska Haskova-Coolidge: diamonds are not always a girl's best friend
Eliska Haskova-Coolidge has had an impressive career. During nearly two
decades working in the White House, she came to know no less than five
American presidents. But for the last fourteen years she has been back in
her native Prague. She was born into a wealthy Czech banking family early
in the Second World War. It was at that time that the family's
difficulties started. Eliska's grandfather was shot by the Nazis, and
after the war, with the communist take-over in 1948, the family once again
became enemies of the state, despised as bourgeois capitalists. They saved
themselves from jail and possibly a still worse fate by smuggling
themselves across the border a year later. Here Eliska Haskova-Coolidge
remembers the day that they were forced to leave their apartment in the
smart residential district of Bubenec.
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Martin Smid - the student who survived his own death on the 17th November 1989
This month is the 14th anniversary of the dramatic events that in a matter
of days brought down Czechoslovakia's communist regime. We remember the
period as a bloodless or "velvet" revolution, but on the 17th
November 1989, at the height of the student demonstration that sparked the
revolution, a rumour spread like wildfire that a mathematics student from
Prague's Charles University, a certain Martin Smid, had been beaten to
death by the police. It was true that Martin had been at the
demonstration, but as we hear from him now, rumours of his death were
greatly exaggerated.
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Jiri 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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