Witness | All stories

At the end of January it will be exactly a year since Vaclav Havel stepped down after thirteen years as president, first of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. One person who spent a lot of time with Havel during his early days as president just after the fall of communism, is the journalist Jiri Vejvoda, now Czech Radio's chief producer of arts programmes. Here he remembers some of the insights he gained at the time.

Juraj Szanto is a medical journalist, and has had a long career in Prague as a dentist. He originally comes from the part of southern Slovakia that was annexed by Hungary just before the Second World War. When the war broke out, his father was sent to the Russian Front and his mother was imprisoned in Budapest for her links with the resistance. Juraj was fifteen when his mother was released in 1944, but this was just the time when the Nazis began to transport Hungarian Jews to the death camps in the east. Juraj and his mother were among thousands

It's exactly fifteen years since one of the events that accelerated the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. January 1989 was the 20th anniversary of the death of Jan Palach, the student who had set himself alight on Prague's Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet occupation. All through the week starting from the 15th January thousands of people gathered beneath the statue of Saint Wenceslas with flowers, to remember Palach's sacrifice. Their quiet protest was put down by police in riot gear using water cannon, a gross over-reaction that

Czech dog-handlers were among the first foreign rescue workers to arrive in the Iranian city of Bam after last month's devastating earthquake. They remained for only three days, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, but during that time they won a great deal of respect for their work searching for survivors and finding the bodies of the dead. Among them was Radek Svatos, and here he recalls some of his impressions.

In the following programme we're going to be hearing some of the best from our weekly series "Witness" from 2003. As regular listeners will know, "Witness" is a programme where people recall a memory in their lives. Given the nature of 20th century history, many of the memories have been about the ability of the human spirit to survive in adversity, but there have also been plenty of moments of humour and romance.

Marketa Richterova is a young actress living in Prague. In communist days her family had huge problems with the regime. Her parents were dissidents and the family was forced to emigrate when Marketa was a child in 1981. Given this traumatic early experience it is not surprising that she has since had a strong sense of understanding for other people forced for whatever reasons to flee their home. Here she talks about how she decided to help out a friend, when the war in Yugoslavia broke out in the early 1990s.

Pavel Klimes lives in the village of Pec pod Snezkou in the Krkonose Mountains of North Bohemia. He runs a museum and information centre for the thousands of people who visit the mountains every year. Pavel is fascinated by the history of the region. Until World War Two the population was almost entirely German-speaking, and when they were expelled after the war, whole villages emptied overnight. Now Pavel is trying to put together some of the fragments of the lost history of the Krkonose Mountains, and part of this project is an attempt to restore

Next year the Czech Republic will be hosting the ice hockey world championships, and I hardly need remind you that ice hockey is a national institution here. The moment remembered in this week's Witness reflects the symbolism of the sport to many Czechs, both at home and abroad. Daniel Satra, who recently finished studying sociology at the University of Göttingen, was born into a Czech family that had emigrated to Germany after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Here he remembers the first time, as a small child in the 1970s, that he became aware of

Lubomir Doruzka is a living legend of Czech jazz. He has been involved in music since the Second World War, when, as a teenager, he worked on an illegal jazz magazine. Because he speaks fluent English he has often accompanied musical ensembles, both jazz and classical, on tours abroad. Here he remembers an extraordinary concert in Addis Ababa during a tour of Africa in 1957, when the Janacek Quartet was invited to play for the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

Eliska Haskova-Coolidge has had an impressive career. During nearly two decades working in the White House, she came to know no less than five American presidents. But for the last fourteen years she has been back in her native Prague. She was born into a wealthy Czech banking family early in the Second World War. It was at that time that the family's difficulties started. Eliska's grandfather was shot by the Nazis, and after the war, with the communist take-over in 1948, the family once again became enemies of the state, despised as bourgeois