David Vaughan

Although she was born in Britain and has never lived in the Czech Republic, the actress and broadcaster, Veronica Hyks, is every bit as Czech as she is English. She speaks…

In last week’s From the Archives we heard about radio’s central role in the Prague Uprising against the German occupation at the end of World War II. Not only did the…

“Calling all Czechs! Come quickly to our aid! Calling all Czechs!” It is May 5 1945, and with these words Prague radio appeals to Czechs to join the uprising against the…

By 1944 Czechoslovakia’s liberation no longer seemed a distant prospect, as Nazi Germany’s enemies closed in from East and West. On June 6 1944 over 130,000 Allied troops…

Over the last few weeks, the actress Veronika Hyks has been bringing us extracts from Jaroslava Skleničková’s memoirs, “If I had been a boy, I would have been shot…”. The…

The wartime president of occupied Bohemia and Moravia, Emil Hácha, is one of the saddest figures of Czech twentieth century history. An elderly academic, he only agreed…

We have now reached the sixth part in our serialized reading of “If I had been a boy, I would have been shot…”, the memoirs of Jaroslava Skleničková. Veronika Hyks has…

In Czech Books we hear the fifth part of Jaroslava Skleničková’s moving memoirs, “If I had been a boy, I would have been shot…”, read by the Czech-British actress…

The scene is Prague. It is just before midday on St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1945. An air-raid siren begins to wail. In previous weeks, Czechs have got used to the…

During the wartime occupation, German-language broadcasts from Prague were absorbed into the radio network of Nazi Germany, the so-called “Reichssender”. A number of…