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A Swiss court has cleared the way for a group of Roma to sue the U.S. computer giant IBM for allegedly helping Nazi Germany track and identify victims for slaughter in concentration camps during World War II. The case could open the door to claims from Roma groups throughout Europe, including in the Czech Republic, where over 90 percent of the Romani population was killed during WW II.

Tuesday this week was Holocaust Remembrance Day in many countries. To mark the occasion the Czech premiere of the oratorio the Song of Terezin was held at Prague's State Opera. The Song of Terezin was written by Franz Waxman and is based on poems written by children interned at the Terezin ghetto, around 60 kilometres north of Prague. The Nazis tried to portray Theresienstadt as it was known in German as a model camp, though less than one in ten of the Jews sent there survived. Among those who did was Alena Munkova-Synkova.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked around Europe on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Here in Prague the day has been marked by the country's first ever performance of the Song of Terezin, an oratorio written by the German-American composer Franz Waxman which is based on poems written by children imprisoned at the Terezin ghetto (known in German as Theresienstadt). The performance, co-sponsored by Czech and Austrian agencies, took place on Tuesday afternoon at the State Opera. A day before the premiere

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

In this week's edition of the Arts, Dita Asiedu we'll be looking at a presentation of Czech culture that is part of the International Cultural Festival of Candidate Countries to the EU currently taking place in Budapest, and two exhibitions in Prague that have been extended due to public interest...

Meanwhile police in the northern town of Trutnov say the graves of 15 Jewish girls killed by the Nazis have been desecrated. Fifteen tombstones were overturned and damaged in the attack. Police are treating the incident as racially-motivated. The head of the Prague Jewish Community said the attack could be connected with the 65th anniversary of "Kristalnacht", when thousands of Jewish shops and synagogues across Germany were burned and looted by the Nazis. He said the number of attacks against Jewish monuments rose each November.

In the Czech countryside there is a tradition that each family slaughters a pig once or twice a year, and lives on the meat for much of the time in between. Although they were Jewish, the Brady family, who ran the general stores in the little town of Nove Mesto na Morave, were no exception. Until the arrival of Hitler, they never felt any different from their neighbours and had never shown much interest in religion. Nothing in their lives prepared them for the horror of what was to come with the occupation. The entire family was murdered in the

Prague's Jewish Museum recently released a CD that is nothing short of miraculous. At the height of the Nazi occupation of Prague during the Second World War, the Czech Jewish jazz musician, Fritz Weiss, made nearly thirty recordings with the Emil Ludvik Orchestra. Weiss was musical leader of the band and also made all the arrangements. Amazingly, he continued to work with the band even after he was sent to the Terezin ghetto. In Encore today, we'll be telling the story of these extraordinary swing recordings, made literally in the shadow of the

Iska Lichter was born Jindriska Zofie Roudnicka in the town of Kolin, in 1930. The daughter of a Jewish father and a gentile mother, she lived a normal life until 1939 and the Nazi occupation. Her parents divorced - deliberately - to avoid the family being persecuted. Her father sent the family to the countryside, he himself went to his mother's town of Podebrady. He was deported to Terezin in 1942 and later sent to Auschwitz, from which he never returned. Iska, who now lives in Colorado, says hardly a day goes by when she does not think of her

In this week's One on One, David Vaughan speaks to Murray Greenfield, a Jewish American who - like his four brothers - was drafted into the services at the outbreak of World War Two. After the war, Murray - who had served in the merchant marine - was asked to volunteer his services in the semi-legal operation to bring Jews out of Europe to Palestine. He later settled in Israel, where he met his future wife Hana - a Jewish Holocaust-survivor from the Czech town of Kolin. Both have written books about their experiences. The couple recently visited