A Stitch in Time: a journey into the past through family memories Radio Prague International

This is the last episode in our series A Stitch in Time, where young people tell stories from their family’s past. We have a taste of sugarcane from Guangdong province in China, we meet a Jewish boy in Baltimore who remembers his own circumcision, and a teenager from Brno takes us to a twilight zone of the unexplained.

In this episode we have four stories set in the Czech or Moravian countryside, tales of ordinary people living through times that were anything but ordinary. Three of them take us back to the Stalinist years of the early 1950s in Czechoslovakia, and the fourth story is more universal, a tale of good advice well taken.

We bring three very different tales of heroism during the 1930s and 1940s. The first is a classic story of wartime courage and adventure, as seventeen-year-old Rade Meech-Tatić recounts a dramatic episode in the life of his grandfather as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Then we turn to occupied Bohemia and Moravia, where eleven-year-old Amy Piper tells the story of her great-great-grandfather from the town of Čáslav, who warned his fellow citizens that they were in danger of arrest. And our third story takes us several thousand kilometres to the south and east. Sixteen-year-old Anushree Kshirsagar from Brno also has a tale of courage and resilience as she talks of the role of her great-great-grandfather in the struggle for Indian independence. Three young people whose home is here in the Czech Republic celebrate three very different family heroes.

In the third episode of our series looking at the recent past through the eyes of the youngest generation, we hear a story of exile and return. Fourteen-year-old Eva Nováková chose the format of a short radio play to draw us into the world of her great-grandmother, Olga Szántová. Older listeners will remember Olga, who died in 2003. She was a legend of Czechoslovak broadcasting and a good friend to many of us here at the radio.

In this episode we continue our journey into the recent past through the eyes of the youngest generation, starting with a classic tale of European emigration in search of the American dream. It is followed by the moving story of a Czech family whose world was turned upside down by the First World War and the story of a Moravian village that has disappeared without trace.

We recently invited children and teenagers from across the Czech Republic to write a story about a member of their own family who had become an influence or inspiration to them. Many of the stories were beautifully and sensitively written, drawing us into the recent and sometimes more distant past through the traces it has left on families. In the coming weeks we shall be joining the children as they explore the world of their family’s history, but in this first episode we offer a foretaste of what is to come.