Witness | All stories

As this month's huge NATO summit in Prague draws nearer, memories of the street fighting of two years ago during the city's IMF/World Bank conference again seem very fresh. Thousands of anti-globalisation protestors converged on the Czech capital and, although most protests were peaceful, there were also several dramatic and violent clashes with the police. At that time the Scottish journalist Nick Carey was working here at Radio Prague. He was out in the streets covering the demonstrations and suddenly found himself in a frightening situation,

Leos Rejmont is a doctor serving in the Czech Army. When the Czech Republic decided to send a field hospital to Afghanistan earlier this year as part of the ISAF mission to guarantee security in and around Kabul, he volunteered to take part. After five months with the 6th Field Hospital in Afghanistan, Leos Rejmont is now back home in Prague. The Czech-run hospital is to remain up and running till the end of the year, and then a smaller group of Czech doctors will continue to work as part of a 20-strong international medical team. The Czech medical

Since 1995 Laszlo Sumegh has been working as a streetworker to help young boys who have found themselves drawn into prostitution in the Czech capital. He has set up the foundation "Sance", which from a tiny office just off Wenceslas Square offers the boys some basic support. He provides condoms, medical attention and often just someone to talk to. Nobody knows how many boys are involved in prostitution, but large numbers are to be seen every evening around Prague's Main Station. Some 60 boys and a handful of girls regularly visit Laszlo Sumegh's

Iveta Durdonova is a young journalist from Prague. She joined Czech Radio four years ago as an editor and producer in the department broadcasting for and about the Czech Republic's Roma minority. She is one of only a handful of Romany journalists working in this country's mainstream media. In the course of her work Iveta has witnessed a great deal, but none of her experiences have had quite the same impact as a conference that she was sent to cover just a few months after she started at the radio. Here she recounts that memory.

Lidija Grebo fled her home in war-torn Sarajevo in 1992, to start a new life in the Czech Republic with her two teenage sons. She's been living here ever since and now works for a non-profit organisation called Slovo21, which helps minorities and promotes tolerance in Czech society. In this week's Witness, Lidija recalls her journey from Sarajevo to Belgrade, and the first time she set eyes on Prague:

As the journalist Jan Urban knows only too well, life as a dissident in Czechoslovakia in 1970s and 80s was a cat-and-mouse game with the State Secret Police. At the time he was a dissident himself, filing from Prague for the Czech sections of Radio Free Europe and the BBC. During the Velvet Revolution he was one of the most prominent figures in Civic Forum that led the country through its first free elections in 1990. He is now an editor and commentator for Czech Radio. Here he remembers an experience that in its grim absurdity was typical for

It's sixty-four years ago this week - at the end of September 1938 - that the fate of Czechoslovakia was sealed in Munich. Britain and France succumbed to pressure from Nazi Germany and agreed to allow Hitler to seize the Czech borderlands. This in effect was the death-knell for Czechoslovakia, and the last democratic state in Central Europe was sacrificed for the illusion of "peace in our time". Most Czechs and Slovaks had been willing to put up a fight, but when their allies abandoned them, President Edvard Benes agreed to cede the borderlands

Arnost Lustig is unquestionably one of the great post-war Czech writers. His novels and stories are known the world over and have been translated into dozens of languages. As a teenager he survived the Nazi concentration camps, a subject which has featured in many of his works. After the war he started his writing career as a journalist, here at Radio Prague, at one of the bleakest times in post-war Czech history. This was the early fifties, when Stalinism reigned at all levels of society and many, including journalists, were murdered in the

The classic image of the piano virtuoso is of a dishevelled eccentric, devoted only to his music and detached from the concerns of everyday life. But the 36-year-old Czech pianist, Jan Simon, is different. He is one of the Czech Republic's best-known contemporary performers, and is both pianist in residence and artistic director of the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra. He is also a devoted family man. Here he looks back to the birth of his daughter nine years ago, a time when he realized that not even Tchaikovsky has quite the appeal of a newborn

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