Archive: History | Second World War Second World War
“Sala’s Gift”: a whole war in a tin box
You will probably not have heard of Gross Sarne, Brande, Blechhammer or
Schatzlar, but these are places that should be remembered. They were all
Nazi slave labour camps in World War Two. The last on that list, Schatzlar,
or Žacléř as it is known in Czech, was in what is now the Czech
Republic, in the part of north-eastern Bohemia annexed by the German Reich
in 1938. Few people in this country, even among the inhabitants of
Žacléř itself, know that the camp even existed, but a new book should
help to put that right. The daughter of one of the survivors has just been
in the Czech Republic, to launch the Czech edition of her book “Sala’s
Gift”. The book tells her mother’s story, drawing richly from Sala’s
own memories and from several hundred letters that, against all odds,
survived the war. David Vaughan tells the story. More
An Englishwoman who has lived in Prague for over six decades – ‘war bride’ Ivy Kovandová – Part II
In the previous episode of Czech Life, we brought you the first part of the
life story of Ivy Kovandová – one of the so-called war brides, English
women who got married to Czech soldiers or pilots during World War II and
then followed their husbands back to their native Czechoslovakia. Today, it
is time for the second part of Ivy’s story – which starts with her
arrival in her husband Oldřich Kovanda’s home country. More
Jan Kaplan: Operation Anthropoid more appreciated as years go by
As part of an exhibition linked to the 70th anniversary of the Lidice
massacre in June, Prague's Dox Centre for Contemporary Art is currently
hosting a video installation by the London-based Czech documentary maker
and editor Jan Kaplan entitled 10:35. The name refers to the time of day
that the operation to assassinate the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia
– which preceded the Lidice atrocity – reached its climax in a Prague
suburb on May 27, 1942. The UK-based Czechoslovak paratroopers who carried
out the attack later met their deaths in a church in the city. More
A long-forgotten story of survival from WWII comes to light
A black and white photograph of a smiling Jewish girl unearthed in a
photographer’s studio some years ago has led a young Czech journalist to
piece together the dramatic story of a large group of Jewish children who
were smuggled to Denmark to escape the Holocaust. While the story of the
Nicolas Winton children is well known, this one is only just coming to
light and will hopefully reunite long-lost friends scattered around the
globe. The freelance journalist who is singlehandedly tackling the task is
Judita Matyasova whom I invited to the studio. She began by telling me how
it all came about. More
An Englishwoman who has lived in Prague for over six decades – ‘war bride’ Ivy Kovandová
Ivy Kovandová is one of the few remaining so-called war brides in the
Czech Republic. ‘War brides’ are Englishwomen who married Czechoslovak
pilots or soldiers stationed in the UK during WWII – an estimated 10,000
soldiers and about 2,500 pilots from Czechoslovakia fought alongside the
allies, and many of them married local women. Some of those women
accompanied their husbands back to their native land after the war. But
most left Czechoslovakia due to the strain that the arrival of the
communist regime placed on their lives, or simply because they felt lost
and homesick. Ivy Kovandová, however, still lives in her cozy apartment in
Prague’s Vršovice neighborhood and says she has never even considered
leaving. Just a few weeks ago, she celebrated her 90th birthday. I recently
visited Ivy at her home, where she told me all about her adventurous life
over cake and coffee. More
Charles Ota Heller: a soldier at the age of nine
In the last days of World War II, nine-year-old Ota Heller picked up a
revolver and fired it at a German soldier. He did not wait to see if the
man was still alive. For decades afterwards he talked to no one about the
experience, and only recently has Ota Heller – or Charles Ota Heller, as
he is now called – felt able to return to his memories of the war,
collecting them in his book “Out of Prague”. In this week’s Czech
Books he talks to David Vaughan. More
Fighter against dictatorships: Cardinal Josef Beran
Archbishop, later Cardinal, Josef Beran, become a symbol of opposition to
totalitarian regimes. He was dubbed the archbishop who refused to be
silenced. The punishment for speaking out was imprisonment first under the
Nazi occupation and then the Communists. More
Village commemorates arrival of parachutists who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich
The village of Nehvizdy, in central Bohemia, on Wednesday commemorated the
70th anniversary of the start of Operation Anthropoid, the targeted killing
of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. Two Czechoslovak commandoes who
carried out the killing, landed near the village on the night of 28
December, 1941. More
A Christmas message from the survivors of Lidice in 1945
With Christmas just round the corner, we break our chronological journey
through the archives this week to go back to Christmas 1945. We’re in
Kročehlavy, a suburb of the industrial town of Kladno near Prague. This
was home to the survivors of one of the horrors of the wartime occupation,
the murder in June 1942 of all the men and most of the children from the
nearby village of Lidice. Only one Lidice family had survived the massacre
intact: Josef Horák was one of two young pilots from the village who had
fled at the beginning of the occupation, and he spent the war serving in
Britain’s Royal Air Force. After the liberation he moved straight back to
Czechoslovakia with his English wife Wynne and their two small children.
The family was a symbol of a new life for Lidice, and over Christmas 1945
Czechoslovak Radio arranged a radio bridge to Britain from a Christmas
party in the Horáks’ living room. Here is a slightly edited version of
that broadcast. More
The bombing of Prague from a new perspective
For all the suffering that Bohemia and Moravia endured during WWII,
relatively little of the damage was physical. Prague escaped the terrible
bombing that left so many of the ancient cities of Europe wasted. There
were incidents, however - two in particular in the last year of the war
that brought large-scale destruction and great loss of life. More
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