Witness | All stories

Jan Tomsky was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in the little Czech town of Dobruska in 1920. As a young man he survived the Second World War in the shelter of a Catholic seminary while most of his relatives were murdered. Later he went on to become a highly respected professor of archaeology, first in Czechoslovakia, and after the Soviet invasion of 1968, at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. He died in 1994. Here his son, the well-known Czech publisher, Alexander Tomsky, recalls the bizarre and strangely symbolic circumstances

Petra Francova grew up in a Czech military family, in the days of the Cold War. This may seem an unlikely beginning for someone who has since spent much of her life helping to develop the non-profit sector in this country. Almost single-handedly she has established a network of 20 offices throughout the Czech Republic, which anyone who needs advice on a particular problem can visit at no cost. The offices are run largely by volunteers and they are based on the network of Citizens' Advice Bureaux in the United Kingdom. Petra Francova's work

Under normal circumstances, most people would envy Vaclav Richter his flat in Prague's Old Town, down near the river and right by the medieval Convent of Saint Agnes. But because of the floods Vaclav, who works as a journalist here at Radio Prague, was among the 50 thousand Prague citizens evacuated last week. After several nervous days of no news about the state of his house, he decided to ignore police cordons and go and have a look. This in itself was something of an adventure, and as Vaclav Richter now tells us, he suddenly found himself

Dr Ivan Douda is a psychologist and has been working with drug addicts for over 25 years. He is one of the founders of Prague's "Drop-in Centre", which has been offering advice to addicts, recommending treatment and sending streetworkers out into the field since 1991.

Today the Prague writer Lenka Reinerova is 86. She grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family, and before the war worked as a journalist, coming into contact with many of the fascinating figures of pre-war literary life in the city. She was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. By pure chance she was out of the country at the time of the Nazi occupation in March 1939. After the war she worked briefly here at Radio Prague, but like so many Jewish thinkers and writers in the Stalinist Czechoslovakia of the early 1950s, she was

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.

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

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

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

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