Prague Journal

Saturday, May 7, 2005.

Prague’s 3-day celebration of the liberation started yesterday, with numerous veterans and other American representatives at wreath-laying ceremonies, speeches, and US Army Band concerts, although wreath-laying and dedications have been going on since Wednesday. We went to see the reenactment of the Prague Uprising and the battle for Czech Radio, where the call to arms was broadcast. On May 5, 1945, a reporter from the Czech Radio, or Český Rozhlas, broadcast a message calling all Czechs to “come to our aid immediately.” Czech Radio, known in those days as Radiojournal, has been at its current location on Vinohradska Street (known in those days as Foch Street), just behind the National Museum, since 1933, ten years after the station was launched. The original call for help, transmitted to call the Czech police, Czech firemen and people in Prague to help defend the radio building, was the signal for the uprising of the Czech people against the Nazis, the final resistance to the German forces in Czechoslovakia. The center of uprising was in the Radiojournal building, which was seriously damaged by an air attack organized by the Nazis. Some of the street fighting along Vinohradska Street was reenacted by 60 actors in historical uniform, tanks and weapons – complete with loud gunfire and many wounded soldiers carried off to medical vans – but we could not see much through the crowds of spectators behind the barriers. On this day in 1945, some 30,000 people answered the call to take up arms against the Germans and, within four days, fierce street fighting left over 2,000 dead. The Prague Uprising finally came to an end on the morning of May 9 with the arrival of the Red Army –the First Ukrainian Front—who defeated the last vestiges of German resistance. Prague was the last European capital to be liberated after six years of terror at the hands of the Nazis. Unlike in Plzen, the Americans are not the heroes here, having stopped east of Prague under the command of General Eisenhower to honor his agreement with Joseph Stalin to stop short of the Czechoslovak capital city.
Later in the afternoon we went to the main train station to see the photography exhibition from Sebastiao Salgado’s documentary series “Workers,” a display of photographs of manual laborers in 27 countries. This exhibit was arranged in specially designed railway cars, which will travel through 10 Czech cities over the next two months.

posted by JWinn @ 9:51 PM