Witness | All stories

During the Communist era, the International Union of Students in Prague played an important role in inviting students from all continents to come and share their experiences and discuss ways of helping the developing world improve conditions. The union was meant to "promote democracy and fight against racism" by joining forces with other students from the world over, Lenka Cossova who worked at the organisation for many years recalls.

Milena Dolezelova is a leading Czech-Canadian sinologist who has worked in the field of East Asian studies for more than thirty years, teaching at the University of Toronto. Professor Dolezelova first moved to Toronto with her husband and two daughters in late 1968, shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. As Mrs Dolezelova explains here several years later they bought a cottage in Ontario as a means of getting away from the city. And, it was during one trip to her cottage that she experienced a coincidental meeting she

The earthquake which hit northern Algiers in May of this year killed over 1,000 people and injured over 7,000. The Czech Republic was one of many states which sent a rescue team to the site of the disaster. Pavel Peceny recalls how they arrived in a town close to Bumirdis, near the epicenter of the quake, 28 hours after the tragedy struck.

Artur Radvansky - a Jewish Holocaust survivor - still bears his Auschwitz tattoo, and will roll up his sleeve to show it you. He will tell you tales of unspeakable horror and grief: experiences which have pursued him in his nightmares for decades. But one memory stands out in his mind from all the others - the day he watched the guards bring in a group of Romany war veterans from Germany, destined for the gas chambers. At a recent seminar on the Roma Holocaust in Prague, Artur told his story to Radio Prague.

Angela Spindler-Brown is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who left Czechoslovakia in 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into the country. She had been a student at Prague's Charles University, editing the main student magazine. In exile in London she remained a journalist, writing and working in television. She is married to an Englishman, hence her rather un-Czech sounding name, and currently edits the bi-monthly magazine of the British Czech and Slovak Association. Here she talks about one change that has affected her life enormously since

The memory in this week's witness comes from deep in Radio Prague's archives. Rudolf Linhart was a young Czech waiter, who had been working in a London hotel in the years before the First World War. At the beginning of 1912 his dream came true and he was taken on by the White Star Line to work as a ship's waiter. He felt honoured when he was chosen to join the crew for the maiden voyage of the greatest ship on earth, the Titanic. The rest is history. In an interview fifty years later Rudolf Linhart remembered the fateful night from the 14th to

Although he is well over 70, Jiri Jes is still an active and highly respected journalist and broadcaster here in the Czech Republic. But for decades he was unable to work in journalism at all. Because his father had been a member of parliament for a non-communist party in the years just after the war, the entire family was on a political blacklist, and in the 1950s Jiri Jes even spent five years in a communist jail. He has always been fascinated by radio, and has witnessed many of the major events of the last sixty years as carried on the airwaves.

Vit Pohanka is Czech Radio's chief foreign affairs correspondent. He recently returned to Prague after a month covering the war in Iraq from Kuwait City. Here Vit talks of some of the lasting impressions from his stay in the Gulf.

Kamil Kotab is a Prague banker in his mid thirties. But he does not spend all his time behind a desk. Kamil has a strong sense of adventure, and ever since the Czech borders were opened with the fall of communism he has travelled to many of the world's more isolated places, especially in the former Soviet Union. Here Kamil recalls a sad, but open-ended Czech-Russian love story from one of his many trips to Russia, a story that has its roots in a time when Russian soldiers were still stationed in this country.

Bradley Abrams is an associate professor of history at Columbia University in New York City, where he specialises in the history of the Czech lands. He received his bachelors degree from the University of Texas and his masters and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. It was at Stanford University that he studied the history of East Europe, and here he describes how a book by Milan Kundera in a Texas bookstore sparked his initial interest in Czech history.