Witness | All stories

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.

Mark Wiedorn is an American photographer, who has lived in Prague for the last three years. He has taken a particular interest in the lives of the Czech Republic's Romany minority. When a friend of his, the Romany social worker Marie Gailova approached him last year and told him of the plight of several Romany families who were reduced to living in squalor in a former brick factory, he agreed to take a series of photographs of the families. They had originally worked in the factory, but when it closed down they lost their apartments and were reduced

Ahmed Mohamud came to the Czech Republic from Somalia ten years ago as a refugee from the country's civil war. At first he was on his own but later he was joined by his wife and children, who had also survived the war. Their first few years in the Czech Republic were difficult, spent in overcrowded camps for asylum seekers in various parts of the country. But today the whole family has Czech citizenship. A couple of years ago they were allocated a flat in the small provincial town of Zatec in the north-west of the country, and now Ahmed has a successful

Petra Prochazkova is the most celebrated Czech war reporter. She has won numerous awards for her coverage of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, but above all she is known for her work in Chechnya, where she reported on both wars in the 1990s before being expelled by the Russian authorities. But Petra has not just stood aside as a passive observer. When she witnessed the suffering of Chechen war-widows and orphaned children, she set out to help them. She established an orphans' home in Grozny and has been instrumental in setting

Being a musician on tour abroad can be a lonely, anonymous experience, but there can also be pleasant surprises. For the last 18 years Miroslav Wanek has been one of the leading figures in the rock band "Uz jsme doma" which has a huge following here in the Czech Republic. He sings, plays guitar and piano, and writes many of the band's songs - with lyrics that in communist days won them many enemies in the corridors of power. Here Miroslav remembers an experience that left a lasting impression when the band was playing in Berlin a few years

Jana Gonda was a teenager at the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Like tens of thousands of Czechs she emigrated with her parents in the months that followed. Today she is back in Prague, as director of the Supraphon record label, after a successful career in Canada. For many émigrés the first impression of life abroad is a disappointment or a moment filled with apprehension, but for Jana Gonda life in exile began very differently. Her first weekend in Canada was like a dream come true. As she now recalls, she was thrown straight