Prague, Feb 27 (CTK) – The Mene Tekel annual festival against totalitarianism started in Prague yesterday, offering exhibitions and a concert in the St Mary of the Snows monastery that highlight the persecution of Czechoslovak Catholics by Communists and the deportations following Lithuania’s annexation by the Soviet Union.
The exhibitions will run through March 9.
A part of the festival programme focuses on Latvia and Lithuania. Documentary films about the two countries will be presented in the Ponrepo cinema, followed by discussion meetings.
The Mene Tekel festival commemorates the victims of Nazism and communism. It marks the historical milestones of Czechoslovakia and other European countries and also highlights the developments elsewhere in the world, where human rights have been violated.
The week-long festival annually starts around February 25, the day when the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948.
One of the exhibitions that the festival’s founders, Daniela and Jan Rericha, opened yesterday, focuses on the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime. It maps the extent of the communist raging, shows the instruments and methods they used to liquidate the church as well as the spiritual life of Czechoslovak society, and also the ways the church faced the pressure.
Two exhibitions present the life stories and martyr’s deaths of priests Jan Bula and Vaclav Drbola, who were executed in separate show trials in the early 1950s.
After the 1989 fall of communism, Bula and Drbola were rehabilitated by courts and the process of their beatification was launched in the 2000s.
One exhibition presents the stories of the inmates of the Cejl 71 communist prison in Brno, all of whom were persecuted, jailed or executed for their opinions.
Another exhibition highlights the historical importance of the massive deportations of Lithuanians after the annexation of their homeland by the Soviet Union in 1941.
About 300,000 people were deported from Lithuania, almost 10 percent of its population, and more than 156,000 of the deportees disappeared in Siberian gulags.
rtj/dr/kva
