Section Archive Witness
Jana Rejskova remembers the "human face" of Alexander Dubcek
Alexander Dubcek is one of the myths in the post-war history of Czechoslovakia. Some see his attempt in 1968 to introduce "socialism with a human face" as a brave experiment, others as naive folly, but on one thing there is consensus. As a man, Dubcek was warm and likable. In the light of the Soviet invasion that followed, there is an almost unbearable poignancy to the broad smile that we so often see in television footage of Dubcek from the time of the Prague Spring. The following story gives some insight into Alexander Dubcek as a person. The professional interpreter Jana Rejskova remembers interpreting for him at an event a couple of years after the fall of communism, not long before his death, when Dubcek was once more in public office, but didn't seem to relish all the trappings.
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Ruth Rulcova: the shock of an English cup of tea
A few days ago - for the first time - Ruth Rulcova had the chance to meet the man who saved her life in 1939. In that strange time between the German occupation of Prague in March and the outbreak of war in September, Sir Nicholas Winton was a British diplomat in Prague. He decided to help Czech Jewish children to get out of Prague while there was still time. In all he arranged for 700 children to be taken in by families in Britain. Their parents and relatives who stayed at home nearly all perished in the gas-chambers of the east. Ruth Rulcova was one of those children. Here she remembers her first impressions on arriving in England.
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Michaela Marksova-Tominova: a confrontation between two worlds
Michaela Marksova-Tominova is the head of the Centre for Gender Studies in Prague and is one of the Czech Republic's foremost feminist academics. At the time of the fall of Communism she was studying natural sciences at Prague's Charles University. Like many Czechs she had been fascinated by the world beyond the barbed wire, and the opening of the Iron Curtain seemed like a dream come true. Not long afterwards she had the chance to spend three years in Britain, and it was there that she came in for a shock. The following account of how she became disillusioned is a familiar one to many Czechs who, like Michaela, had high expectations of the west. More
Erazim Kohak - chinks in the Iron Curtain
With the communist takeover in 1948 Erazim Kohak left Czechoslovakia as a teenager. It was the beginning of over forty years of exile, during which Erazim Kohak became a respected university professor, philosopher and writer in the United States. But he never lost his strong sense for where his homeland lay, and after the fall of communism Erazim Kohak didn't hesitate to return to his native country for good. Here he looks back to the late 1940s, travelling to the Czechoslovak border from Vienna, his first stop on the path to exile, just to catch a glimpse of the native land he had recently left.
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Jiri Kral on the sport of cooking
Jiri Kral is chef at the French restaurant in the Art Nouveau "Obecni dum" just off Republic Square in Prague. He is one of the Czech Republic's most accomplished cooks, and earlier this year he was part of a Czech team that battled through to the final of one of the most highly respected international culinary competitions, Culinary Challenge 2002, which took place this year in Singapore. The team surprised the competition from countries far more famous for their cuisine by bringing home both a bronze and a gold medal. Here Jiri Kral talks of his impressions.
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Kumar Vishwanathan - an extraordinary decision to join homeless Roma
In July 1997 floods swept through the city of Ostrava in the east of the Czech Republic. The entire district of Hrusov was devastated, leaving dozens of Roma families homeless. At that time Kumar Vishwanathan, a young physics teacher from India, was working at a school about sixty kilometers away in Olomouc. In the wake of the floods he made an extraordinary decision that completely changed his life - to help the homeless Roma families by moving in with them into their emergency accommodation...
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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
The Lidice massacre - atrocity and courage
Sixty years ago this week, the Nazis wiped the Czech village of Lidice from the map. All the men were shot. Apart from a few who were adopted in Germany all the children were sent to the gas chambers, and the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. But two men from Lidice, Josef Horak and Josef Stribrny, survived. They were in Britain, fighting in the Royal Air Force. The Nazis treated their relatives back home with particular cruelty. All their family members were shot, with the sole exception of Josef Horak's sister Anicka, who was pregnant. Anicka survived, but was immediately separated from her newborn daughter. In England Josef - or Pepik - Horak had recently married a young Englishwoman, Wynne. Here Wynne remembers how she and her husband heard the news of the Lidice tragedy at the barracks where they were stationed in Norfolk.
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Retracing a journey to cheat death
In 1939, a 19-year-old Jewish man called Jan Wiener fled Czechoslovakia. He was determined to reach England and join the RAF, to help free his country from the Nazis. His parents were divorced: his mother had been sent to the Terezin concentration camp, his father was living in Yugoslavia. Jan went to Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast, where he watched his father and his step-mother take their own lives rather than face deportation to the death camps. His father had told him to run for his life - he did so, hiding above the wheels of a train bound for Italy. In the town of Trieste he was discovered and arrested by the Italian police...
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Romance in a yellow cab
Iva Pekarkova is one of those writers who observe life through living it. She has never been afraid of taking risks, whether as a rebellious teenager in 1970s Czechoslovakia or ten years later when she smuggled herself out of the country via Yugoslavia, and more recently still behind the wheel of a New York yellow cab. All these experiences find their way into her writing, and if you don't speak Czech you can enjoy three of her novels in English translation: "Truck Stop Rainbows", "The World is Round" and "Gimme the Money" - which offers a vivid portrait of the life of a New York taxi driver. Iva is now back in Prague, although she's feeling more and more homesick for cosmopolitan NYC. Here she describes one of her more unlikely experiences from her cab driving days.
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