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Professor Milan Fryščák is a leading member of the US-based Czechoslovak Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been closely involved over the years with several other Czech krajan organisations (krajan is a hard to translate word meaning essentially Czech expatriate). After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1957, he ended up in the US, where he still teaches Czech and Russian. At his office at New York University, I asked Professor Fryščák whether, given the languages he was teaching during the Cold War, many of his American students had gone on to become

On September 11, 2001, the Czech-born architect Jiří Boudník was working across the East River from the World Trade Center, on the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge. He tried and failed to reach the Twin Towers on 9/11 itself, but returned the following day and spent six months taking part in the clean-up operation at Ground Zero, experiencing horrors that stay with him to this day.

Meda Mládková is a Czech art collector who spent more than half of her life in exile, mostly in the United States. In 1968 she established a collection of Czech art which she brought to the US from behind the Iron Curtain. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Meda Mládková returned to Czechoslovakia and donated her entire collection to the country. I met Mrs Mládková in her museum on Prague’s Kampa Island and started by asking how she became involved in art collecting in the first place:

Thomas M. Messer was born in Bratislava in 1919 but moved to Prague at the age of four, when his father got a job teaching German Studies at Charles University. After moving to the US at the start of World War II, he went on to work at a number of art institutions, including New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where he was director for 27 years. Mr Messer, today an urbane gentleman of 88, grew up in Czechoslovakia’s inter-war period First Republic, regarded by many as the country’s golden era. Would he share that view?

One of my first ports of call on a recent visit to New York was the city’s Czech Centre, which is at Madison Avenue and 83rd St in Manhattan. At least that’s where it’s located for the moment – later in the year it’s moving to the Bohemian National Hall, around 15 minutes walk away. New York Czech Centre director Monika Koblerová talks about that move and much more in this edition of One on One.

Our guest for One on One this week is Jakub Cigler, one half of the duo behind Cigler-Marani – an award-winning firm of architects whose elegant designs have helped them become one of the leaders in their field in this country. Cigler-Marani have been in the news of late because their design has been chosen by the city of Prague to revamp the Czech capital’s somewhat jaded main thoroughfare Wenceslas Square.

Martin Palouš was one of the first signatories of the Charter 77 protest document. Since 1989 he has been a parliamentary deputy, an academic, and Czech ambassador to Washington. Now, however, Mr Palouš represents the Czech Republic at the United Nations in New York. When we spoke last week at his office on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, we began with the subject of Charter 77 and his days as a dissident.

On the occasion of its 660th anniversary, Charles University recently hosted an annual meeting of Europaeum, an association of ten leading European universities, including Oxford. Europaeum also organized a workshop on European migration at the Institute of Economics, drawing young scholars from Leiden, Geneva, Prague, Oxford and Krakow. At the end of the week I met with Europaeum’s secretary general Paul Flather and asked him to tell me more about its history:

My guest this week is Zuzana Ondomišiová who runs an organisation called Portala, which promotes Tibetan cultural issues in the Czech Republic. With the recent protests and subsequent Chinese crackdown, Tibet has certainly been on the radar both in the Czech Republic and around the world. I began by asking her to tell me a little more about this NGO.

When Dr Jana Švehlová’s father was imprisoned by the communists for political reasons it left a deep impression on her life. After doing research into the psychological impact of such experiences on women like herself, she began a group called Daughters of the '50s which is a forum for discussion of often painful memories – and a support group for women whose childhoods, and often subsequent lives, were blighted by the mistreatment of their parents. When I met Dr Švehlová at a Prague centre cafe, she first told me her own family’s story.