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Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright accompanied Defence Minister Alexandr Vondra on a visit to Terezín on Sunday, the site of a former Jewish ghetto and Gestapo-run prison during World War II, from which tens of thousands were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The former secretary of state, who was born to Czech Jewish parents in Prague in 1937, laid flowers at the National Cemetery at the Terezín memorial - remembering those who died in the Holocaust including 24 members of her own family. During her visit she also had a print made of her hand for the local museum known as Krištálový dotek (Crystal Touch), where casts are made in crystal and displayed. Others whose hands were cast in the past include the late Václav Havel and Arnošt Lustig.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas on Monday attended a commemorative ceremony for the victims of the Romany Holocaust. At the site of a former concentration camp in Lety, Mr Nečas admitted the Czech responsibility for the murder of over 5,000 Romanies during the war. But the official event sparked controversy among the Romany community which says the government should first make sure the victims were giving a dignified memorial.

Several Czech Romany groups on Saturday called for a boycott of Monday’s official ceremony in commemoration of Romany victims of the Holocaust. Prime Minister Petr Nečas and other officials are to attend the event held at the site of a former concentration camp in Lety, in southern Bohemia; however, some Romany representatives said the government should first remove a large pig farm built on the site of the camp after the war. The farm’s existence has been a controversial issue in the Czech society for years; attempts by several Czech governments to remove failed due to high relocation costs demanded by the farm’s owners.

The Sudetengerman group Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft, which on Saturday kicked off its annual meeting in Nuremberg, has awarded the writer and painter Max Mannheimer, who was born in Czechoslovakia, with its Karl IV. prize. The 92-year-old Mannheimer, who was born in Nový Jičín, is a Jewish Holocaust survivor. He said in his acceptance speech that he felt no hatred towards either the Czech or the German nation for what he had suffered through.

The award is meant to honor contributions to the Czech-German dialogue and good relations between both countries as well as people who fight against extremism and intolerance.

The Israeli author Tom Segev is in Prague to launch the Czech translation of his acclaimed biography of the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. Entitled Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Tom Segev’s latest work offers a critical yet compassionate look at the complicated man who devoted his life to tracking down Nazi criminals. Radio Prague spoke to Tom Segev during his Prague visit, and asked him how different the real Simon Wiesenthal was from the myths he himself helped create.

You will probably not have heard of Gross Sarne, Brande, Blechhammer or Schatzlar, but these are places that should be remembered. They were all Nazi slave labour camps in World War Two. The last on that list, Schatzlar, or Žacléř as it is known in Czech, was in what is now the Czech Republic, in the part of north-eastern Bohemia annexed by the German Reich in 1938. Few people in this country, even among the inhabitants of Žacléř itself, know that the camp even existed, but a new book should help to put that right. The daughter of one of the survivors

A black and white photograph of a smiling Jewish girl unearthed in a photographer’s studio some years ago has led a young Czech journalist to piece together the dramatic story of a large group of Jewish children who were smuggled to Denmark to escape the Holocaust. While the story of the Nicolas Winton children is well known, this one is only just coming to light and will hopefully reunite long-lost friends scattered around the globe. The freelance journalist who is singlehandedly tackling the task is Judita Matyasova whom I invited to the studio.

The diary of Michal Kraus (who survived the Holocaust as a boy) was published on Friday on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As a boy, Kraus went through Terezín and later the Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps where he lost both parents and he survived two death marches. He wrote his diary shortly after the end of the war but never published it. He had started writing a diary at home, prior to deportation but in Auschwitz it was taken away from him. The diary will be officially presented at the seat of the Prague Jewish Community on February 2.

Mr Kraus´s diary describes the events and relations in the camp and condemns inhuman behaviour of some inmates, the Czech news agency reports. In July 1948, 17-year-old Michal Kraus left Czechoslovakia and moved to Canada with the help of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. He took his diary with him and later gave it to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Copies of the diary are kept by four museums in the Czech Republic and Israel. Mr Kraus, now 81, decided to publish his diary because of the persecution of ethnic and other minorities, still a problem in the Czech Republic and Europe in general, he said.

It's exactly seventy years since the first transport of Czechoslovak Jews left Prague, bound for the garrison town of Terezín, transformed by the Nazis into a ghetto and concentration camp. Some 140,000 Jewish men, women and children were sent to Terezín, known as Theresienstadt in German; most of them were later killed at Auschwitz. A number of events were held this week bringing together Terezín survivors, one of them on Thursday evening at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.

Over 200 former inmates of the Terezín, or Theresienstadt, Nazi concentration camp along with their relatives on Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of the start of deportations of Jews from the Czech lands. The head of the Terezín Initiative, Dagmat Lieblová, said that as former inmates of the ghetto gradually pass away, their memories will be carried on by their children. The commemoration included a performance of Hans Krása’s opera Brunidbár, staged by the children in the ghetto, and other events.

Between 1940 and 1945, more than 150,000 people, mostly Jews, from the Czech lands, Slovakia, Germany, and other countries passed through the Terezín ghetto on their way to Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland where most of them were murdered.