Join us for the tour to hear a story of Prague’s darkest hour – the time of World War II and the Holocaust, to listen about both, terror and fear as well as of courage and hope.
Czechoslovakia, the state born in the result of the collapsing empires after WWI, ceased to exist even before the outbreak of WWII. Hitler making his territorial demands, with the consent of western European powers, took over the country. Facing threts of German bombing of Prague and Nazi forces invading his country, Czechoslovak president went down having a heart attack.
In March 1939, standing on the Prague Castle, Hitler proclaimed the creation of the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The German Nazi forces beagun to change multi-ethnic city, that for centuries was Prague. As a result, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe was almost entirely murdered by the Germans. Immediately the Czech people started to form resistance. Its most spectacular action was the Operation Anthropoid – the assasination of Reinhard Heydrich, German protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the architects of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” – the killings of millions of European Jews during the Holocaust. In response, the Germans started bloody repercussions and mass killings of many civilians, including massacres of entire nearby villages.
This, however, was not the end of the city’s tragedy. Towards the end of the war it was bombed by the Allied forces and in the final days of the war people of Prague started a National Uprising against the Germans. The streets of the city ended up in bloodbath, hours before its liberation. On May 9th 1945 Prague fell into the hands of the Soviets, and was under their influence for the next 44 years until the so-called Velvet Revolution in 1989 resulting in the Czech Republic and Slovakia emerging as democratic states. That story encompasses the bloody Warsaw Pact intervention of 1968 and the famed Velvet Revolution spearheaded by Václav Havel and Czechs winning their freedom back. Might seem like a fairy tale story in a fairy tale city, but was it really so? Let us tell you all about it!
Join us to learn about all those events during a tour which we have created to honour our great-grandparents who lived at the time of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and our parents, who lived through the strange times of communism. A tour that gives us the opportunity to make their memories and voices being heard and remembered.
