Prague, Feb 25 (CTK) – An exhibition highlighting the fates of Sudeten German Christians who stood up against Nazism and paid with their lives for it was opened in Prague’s Emmaus Monastery in the presence of Cardinal Dominik Duka and Culture Minister Daniel Herman on Saturday.
The exhibition commemorating the German Christians’ resistance to Nazism in the period from 1938 to 1945 is a part of the weekend conference held by the Ackermann community that focuses on the development of Czech-German relations.
The exhibition will ru through the end of March and it will tour other towns across the Czech Republic afterwards.
Herman (Christian Democrats, KDU-CSL) said the stories of the German anti-Nazi fighters are a lesson for people to learn.
“It is always encouraging to follow the stories of those who passed a test. The concrete witnesses of humanness, whom this exhibition is dedicated, are living examples of this,” Herman said.
The exhibition’s protagonists include five priests and two nuns, who served in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, and stood up against the Nazis.
The exhibition narrates the people’s fates, it is not limited to mere enumeration of data. It does not present all courageous Sudeten Germans but selected persons as representatives of all opponents of Nazism, the organisers said.
The lives of the heroes ended either in concentration camps or execution yards.
The Ackermann community ecumenic group was established in the Czech Republic in early 1999. Its goal is to help build the future of Europe aware of the common history of Czechs and Germans. It is a sister organisation of the German Ackermann community that was established in 1946 as a Catholic association linked to Germans who were deported from Czechoslovakia after the war, mainly from its border regions (Sudetenland), where they formed a majority of inhabitants before.
Its name derives from “Ackermann aus Boehmen” (ploughman from Bohemia), a 14th-century literary work by west-Bohemian native Jan of Zatec.
