Witness | All stories

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

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

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...

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.