Czech weekend news in brief: November 14, 2021

Families of former Czech political prisoners and other volunteers created the Alley of Freedom by planting 100 trees (11 lime trees and 89 maples) near the Vojna Memorial outside of Příbram on Saturday.

"The patron of the alley is Klára Formanová, whose father was political prisoner Jiří Stránský," says David Kopecký from the Czech environmental foundation Nadace Partnerství. Stránský was repeatedly imprisoned by the communist government, and found guilty of high treason in a 1953 show trial.

One of the 400 volunteers who helped plant trees was Libuše Musilová, who was persecuted and imprisoned by Czechoslovak communists in the 1950s, and who is still active in the Confederation of Political Prisoners in Příbram. The Alley of Freedom is a joint project by Příbram and the Nadace Partnerství.

Cave explorers researching the Moravian Karst area have discovered four large domes full of stalactites near the Punkva Caves. Research at the site began around thirty years ago, but only recently have the new formations been discovered. Explorers expect to find even more previously-undiscovered spaces within the expansive cave system.

"The system of newly discovered spaces consists of four domes, they are relatively the same size, between thirty and fifty meters long, sometimes up to fifteen meters high," researcher Tomáš Minks says. The explorers accessed the caves, which are an estimated 45 meters underground, via ropes leading down from the surface.

John Williams' iconic score from the Star Wars series will fill the halls of Prague's Rudolfinum on Saturday, November 27. The Film Philharmonic Orchestra will perform selections of Williams' music from the films alongside local cosplayers dressed as characters from the film, and members of the audience are invited to join them in costume.

The concert will present selections from all generations of the film series, which began with the release of Star Wars in 1977 and has since seen three trilogies of feature films. Music from the original trilogy will be the focus of the first half of the concert, with selected pieces from the prequel and sequel trilogies presented after an intermission.

Václav Zelenka, a child who survived the Lidice massacre and later served as the town's mayor (1999-2006) died today at the age of 83, Jana Chourová Plachá reported on the website of the Lidice Memorial. Zelenka had focused on spreading the legacy of the Lidice tragedy among the public.

Zelenka, three years old in 1942, was one of several children selected by the Nazis for re-education, sending them to live with German families. Eighty-two other children from Lidice were killed in deportation camps. Zelenka lived in children’s homes and with a German family in Lohse under the name Rolf Wagner. He was found in May 1947 and sent back to Czechoslovakia, where he was reunited with his mother. He moved to the newly-built Lidice with her, and lived there until the end of his life.

The number of foreigners working for the state and the public sector in the Czech Republic has been increasing, and there were over 8,000 of them during the first half of 2021. Ten years ago, there were 4,900 foreigners working for the Czech state and public sector. Most of the foreign employees in the public sphere were from Slovakia, followed by those from Ukraine, Russia and Poland.

Last year, about 7,700 foreigners worked for the state and public sector. In 2019, before the coronavirus epidemic, about 7,100 foreigners worked in these areas. The Czech state and public sector employed 5,100 people from abroad in 2015 and about 4,900 in 2011.

Member of the Civic Democrats in the Czech lower house group called on the Czech government in resignation to send police officers to Poland to help deal with the crisis at the border with Belarus, it said in a press release today. The Czech government should support any measures against the Belarusian regime on which European Union bodies agree, say the Civic Democrats.

In reaction to the call, outgoing Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhánek said on Twitter that the government is in contact with the Polish side, it has offered support, and will help if Poland is interested in it. Thousands of migrants from non-EU countries have attempted to enter EU territory from Belarus over the past week.