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Gideon Klein has been known mainly as a Czech Jewish composer who was interned in Terezín and later died in Auschwitz. A new international performance, which has its Czech premiere at the Prague Conservatory on Tuesday evening, wants to present Klein in a new perspective: as a fascinating young individual who was very much part of the pre-war vibrant Prague music scene.

This week, Prague is hosting the seventeenth edition of the annual Nine Gates festival of Czech-German-Jewish culture. The event, which got underway on Wednesday, takes place at Prague’s Bubny railway station, where during World War II Czech Jews boarded trains to concentration and death camps. This year, the festival focuses on a lesser-known chapter in the history of WWII: Shanghai’s role in sheltering thousands of European Jews.

Germany is to pay compensation to remaining elderly victims of the Roma Holocaust who suffered during WWII in concentration camps such as Lety or the death camp Auschwitz. Each will receive a one-off payment of around 2,560 euros in the coming months. The agreement was reached with the help of the Czech Foreign Ministry and former special envoy on Holocaust issues, Jiří Šitler (now the Czech ambassador to Stockholm).

Terezín is a small (tentative) UNESCO Heritage Site town in the Ústí nad Labem Region about 80 kilometres north-west of Prague. The town is situated on the banks of the Ohře river, about a kilometre away from the point at which the Ohře flows into the mighty Elbe river, and the same distance away from the much larger nearby town of Litoměřice. Of course, since WWII, Terezín has been associated with the notorious Theresienstadt concentration camp established by the SS.

May 19th marked what would have been the 107th birthday of Sir Nicholas Winton – the British humanitarian, who helped rescue mainly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in the run up to the Second World War. And the Czech Republic is participating in events staged in London to mark the birthday.

Several hundred people, including war veterans, government ministers, parliament deputies, church dignitaries and cultural figures gathered at Terezín National Cemetery on Sunday to pay homage to victims of the Holocaust. Speaker of the Senate Milan Štěch said in his speech that this dark chapter of history required self-reflection and objectivity. He stressed that one could not put on par the atrocities of the criminal Nazi ideology with the post-war expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. The Nazis interned 155,000 Jews at the Terezín camp between 1941 and 1945. Up to 100,000 of them were transported to Auschwitz and other death camps, around a fifth of those interned in Terezín met their deaths there.

Four-day Freedom Celebrations got underway on Thursday in Pilsen to mark the liberation of the city by the US army in 1945. The event started with a reading of the names of Holocaust victims’ in the city centre on the occasion of Yom Ha Shoah, the day of remembrance of Holocaust victims. This year’s celebrations will offer commemorative meetings, military presentations, concerts, exhibitions, as well as meetings with veterans. A Ride of Freedom, including historical Jeeps with war veterans, will cross the town centre on May 7.

A new documentary called “Na sever” (“Into the North”) recounts the story of over 300 Jewish teenagers from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, who found refuge in Denmark during the Holocaust thanks to the kindness of hundreds of Danish families. The story was discovered by chance just few years ago by a Czech journalist Judita Matyášová. Now, a Czech Israeli-based filmmaker Nataša Dudinská decided to bring the testimonies of some of these “children” to the screen.

Thousands of Jewish writers and musicians found their careers cut short by the Holocaust. Tragically, this was the culmination of a long history of persecution and pogroms in many parts of Europe. Lives were destroyed and in many cases people’s work was lost, forgotten or torn from its cultural and linguistic context. Now a major new project is underway to bring to together some of the shattered fragments of this rich legacy of music and theatre. It will culminate in an international festival, Out of the Shadows, which will take place in several

Karel Weirich is perhaps an unfamiliar name to most Czechs and to most of the world. Yet this modest man contributed in large part to keeping the world informed about the plight of Bohemia and Moravia under Nazi occupation. And he also helped to save the lives of hundreds of Jews living in Italy during WWII. The exact number is not known.