News

Over 70 percent of Czech elementary schools, secondary schools and kindergartens are taking part in a one-day warning strike on Monday calling for higher funding for education and other changes. While some schools taking part will remain completely closed, others will be offering only partial services.

According to the school unions, the funds earmarked for next year will not allow schools to maintain the present quality of education, since they will be forced to lay off both teachers and assistants in order to maintain the present level of salaries.

Czech Education Minister Mikuláš Bek apologized to parents on Sunday evening for the fact that they and their children had become hostages in a dispute between the government, unions and strikers. He said none of the possible changes in the education system would lead to a deterioration in the quality of education.

Meanwhile, nurses and other medical personnel are also set to hold a strike on Monday against austerity measures implemented by the Czech government and so are hundreds of other firms in the industrial sector, including employees of carmaker Škoda Auto.

Věra Čepelová, one of the last survivors of the Lidice massacre, died on Sunday at the age of 88. Mrs. Čepelová, née Vokatá, was one of the nine Lidice children selected by the Nazis for re-education. She was sent to a German family where she was renamed Vera Melnik.

In 1946 she was discovered thanks to the activities of the Czechoslovak repatriation committee and in September of the same year she returned to Czechoslovakia. She met with her mother, who survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and in 1951 they moved to a new house in Lidice, where Věra has spent the rest of her life.

The small central Bohemian village of Lidice was razed to the ground by the Nazis on June 10, 1942, in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The men were shot and the women and children were sent to concentration camps. The site of the tragedy is now a national memorial.

A green jacket belonging to the late president Václav Havel sold for more than CZK 2.7 million at an auction at Prague’s Žofín Palace on Sunday. The late dissident and playwright wore the jacket when addressing the crowd on Wenceslas Square on November 21, 1989. Its starting price was CZK 200,000.

The auction also included two paintings by Havel and a handwritten letter from February 1989, when he was sentenced to nine months in prison for participating in a protest during the anniversary of Jan Palach’s self-immolation. The money raised in the auction will go towards the reconstruction of the Lucerna Palace in Prague.

The government has complied with the request of dissident Jiří Gruntorád, who has gone on a hunger strike over low pensions for ex-dissidents, and revoked its resolution signing up to the tradition of the Charter 77 struggle for human rights and democracy.

Gruntorád, a Charter 77 signatory, has been on the strike since November 17 in protest of the treatment former dissidents were receiving under the management of Labour and Social Affairs Minister Marian Jurečka. He was later joined by another ex-dissident, John Bok.

Mr. Gruntorád initially demanded the minister’s resignation, however he later said he would end the hunger strike if the government repeals the resolution.