Related articles

You might not expect the memoirs of a 19th century Jewish shopkeeper in a small Bohemian town to make for gripping reading, but Šimon Wels, who was born in 1853, was no ordinary shopkeeper. His account of his life and the lives of those around him draws us into a lost world. Not only is Wels a wonderful storyteller, but he also writes with a remarkable literary sophistication. The book is full of humour and local colour, but is also rich in literary references and there are numerous asides, where the author comments on the prejudices and social

A number of Czech towns and cities marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday with traditional outdoor ceremonies at which the names of Holocaust victims are read out by politicians, church dignitaries and leading cultural figures. In the Czech capital the ceremony took place at Prague’s Náměstí Míru square attended among others by the minister for human rights and minorities, Jiří Dienstbier, the Israeli ambassador to Prague Garz Koren and others. The event, held for the 9th year now, is jointly organized by the Foundation for Holocaust Victims and the Terezín Initiative Institute. Of Czechoslovakia’s pre-war Jewish population of 350,000, 250,000 died during the Holocaust.

A group of young actors from Philadelphia in the US visited the Czech Republic last week to give a performance at the former Nazi concentration camp of Terezín. They staged I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a play based on poetry written by child inmates of the camp, at the Attic Theatre in Terezín, the very space where some of the play’s characters performed seven decades ago.

The run-down Praha-Bubny train station is now a fairly insignificant stop on commuter train routes going to and from destinations west of Prague. But in the early 1940’s, this was the setting for one of the darkest and cruelest chapters in Czech history. Now there are plans to create a memorial to victims of the Holocaust right in this station.

In the last Czech Books we met the artist Helga Weissová-Hošková, who talked about her remarkable wartime diaries. She drew and described what she saw and experienced in the Terezín ghetto, where she was sent at the age of just twelve in 1941. Amazingly, her diaries have only just been published in full, but they have since aroused so much interest that they have been translated into no less than sixteen languages. In the second part of his conversation with Helga, David Vaughan asks her about her life after the war, and the fate of her diaries

When the wartime diaries and drawings of Helga Weissová were published in in Britain last year, they caused quite a stir. Up to that time they had been all but forgotten, even here in her home city of Prague, and only fragments had ever being published. Yet there are few more vivid evocations of life in the Terezín Ghetto, where Helga was sent with her parents in 1941. Her father perished, but miraculously Helga and her mother, as well as her diary and drawings survived. David Vaughan went to meet Helga, now a sprightly 84-year-old, at the flat

A concert at Prague’s Rudolfinum on Saturday marked the 70th anniversary of the biggest mass murder of Czechoslovak citizens during WWII. On the night of March 8, close to 3,800 prisoners from Terezín – men, women and children were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and gassed. The commemorative concert included the works of Jewish composers who were murdered at Auschwitz. The Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra performed them under conductor Libor Pešek and in cooperation with the pianist Martin Kasík, violinist Pavel Šporcl, members of the Disman Radio Children’s Choir, Czech Radio Children´s Choir and Prague Philharmonic Choir.

The oldest known Holocaust survivor, Prague-born pianist Alice Herz-Sommer, has died at the age of 110. Born in 1903, she was from a German speaking Jewish family and knew such figures as Franz Kafka and Max Brod. The Nazis interned her at the Terezín concentration camp, where she was to take part in over 100 concerts, in 1943. After the war Herz-Sommer lived in Israel for four decades before moving to London, where she passed away on Sunday.

Ten historic synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia are undergoing massive renovations and are set to reopen in all their former glory next year. The Ten Stars project includes such gems of Jewish heritage as Baroque synagogues in Mikulov and Jičín and neo-Romanesque ones in Plzeň and Krnov, as well as several other minor Jewish monuments.

The Ghetto Museum in Terezín on Wednesday launched a new exhibition dedicated to the commanders and guards of the former Nazi concentration camp. Entitled Perpetrators of Crimes, the exhibit also follows the Nazi guards’ lives after the war. Around 155,000 Jews from various European countries were deported to Terezín between 1941 and 1945 on their way to Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland.