Witness | All stories

Translator and interpreter Katerina Vondrova left communist Czechoslovakia with her parents in 1981 when she was just ten years old. The family moved to Sydney, Australia and Katerina went to primary and secondary school there, without knowing whether she would ever be allowed to visit her native country again. She was in her final year of high school, preparing for a university course in Australia, when something happened on the other side of the globe that altered her plans and determined her future life.

Jaromir Krejci is a young Czech Egyptologist, teaching at the Institute of Egyptology of Charles University in Prague. A few years ago, shortly after his graduation, he joined excavation works conducted by Czech Egyptologists in a pyramid complex near the Egyptian city of Abusir, on the site allocated to the Czech Republic by the Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities. Here Jaromir Krejci recalls one morning when the Czech team unexpectedly discovered the mummy of a nameless Ancient Egyptian queen.

Libor Pesek is one of the best-known and most respected Czech conductors, famous in the English-speaking world for the ten successful years he spent in Britain as chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He recently celebrated his 70th birthday, but for this week's "Witness", he looks into his distant past long before his musical career began, to a childhood memory of the day in 1945 when the Red Army liberated Prague.

In 1949, just after the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, Oldrich Cerny went into exile. His family's problems had begun during the Nazi occupation, as his father was a well known Czech patriot, and the communists looked on the family with similar suspicion. From exile Oldrich Cerny remained loyal to his home country and was one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, a network of university teachers and scientists in exile. To this day he is still working to build bridges between Czechs abroad and back home.

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