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Building a better future

A unique Czech-German effort celebrates a decade of achievement

By Benjamin Thomas Cunningham
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 9th, 2008 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
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COURTESY PHOTO
Czech-German Football School players won a recent tournament sponsored, in part, by the Czech-German Fund for the Future. Above: Konrad Scharinger, fund director.
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Many students graduating from college these days don’t remember the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, since they were young children when it happened, says Konrad Scharinger, director of the Czech-German Fund for the Future in Prague.
Scharinger feels he has a responsibility to teach them. He recently invited about 30 18-year-olds to the German Embassy to discuss the events of 1989, when thousands of East Germans fled to Prague and climbed the fence of what was then the West German Embassy to take refuge while seeking asylum.
 “Most young people don’t even know about German reunification, so we have to tell them,” Scharinger says.
The Czech-German Fund is about much more than what happened in 1989, however. At a July 1 ceremony at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the organization celebrated 10 years of efforts aimed at healing the wounds of the past and promoting Czech-German relations. The event also marked the beginning of a new agreement signed by the two governments to continue the fund’s efforts for another 10 years.
The Czech-German Fund started with 86 million euros in seed money and a high-minded goal of giving reparation money to Czech victims of the former Nazi regime. Altogether, more than 87,000 Czechs who did forced labor for the Third Reich during World War II or were otherwise victims of the Nazi occupation have been given compensation. Another 46 million euros was paid to an additional 8,000 people who were considered to be victims of the Nazi regime, according to German Embassy spokesman Sebastian Gerhardt.
After those initial reparations, the fund focused on restoring hundreds of buildings, churches and synagogues in the Czech Republic that had been neglected for decades, starting with the Nazi regime. Over the past decade, it has funded more than 4,400 projects, to the tune of about 2.5 million euros per year, that include student and cultural exchanges, scholarships and art events — almost anything that promotes cooperation and understanding between the two countries.
The fund’s primary focus has been on young people.
“As the name says, it’s about the future of our youth, who will be the future of our economy and our society,” Scharinger says. “The secret of the success of the fund is that they are enticed into cooperation. We are inviting them to cooperate with each other.”
The Czech-German Football School, a soccer club made up of both Czech and German boys and girls, is a prime example of the fund’s activities. Children 6–12 get both soccer and language training several times a week, rotating between the German towns Hof and Rehau and the Czech towns of Františkovy Lázně and Skalná, home of soccer star Pavel Nedvěd.
On the weekend, the group plays in tournaments and friendly matches with other soccer clubs. In tournaments, the club represents the Czech-German border region.
It’s interesting to watch the children learn how to play on a team together, says organizer Gerald Prell, since sports is often a microcosm of the way life works.
“It’s funny, because they’re often quite shy,” he says. “But if they win the matches, they think it’s a great European thing, and they work together more easily.”
The fund also sponsors an annual German-language theater festival in Prague. Another smaller project brings one cultural event to 70 to 80 towns along the border between the two countries every summer.
While all of the projects are important, some of the fund’s most significant work has been with Nazi war victims. Since moving to the Czech Republic, Scharinger has made friends with concentration camp survivors such as Oldřich Stranský (See sidebar) and Felix Kolmer, who share his passion for keeping history alive. They serve as visible reminders that the hatreds of the past cannot be allowed to resurface.
Scharinger doesn’t see threats to his work in the recent activities of right-wing extremist groups who staged an inflammatory march in Prague’s Jewish Quarter last November, and attacked a gay rights parade in Brno two weeks ago. Such groups remain small because most people aren’t interested in their politics anymore, he believes. In fact, he finds it astonishing that anyone would be interested, given how the Czechs were treated by the Nazis.
“To be against something, to cut your hair or use certain symbols, this must be because you just want to be radical,” Scharinger says. “In general, we are preventing such developments by promoting reconciliation and keeping the memory alive.”
Beth Potter can be reached at features@praguepost.com

 

Holocaust survivor shares experiences with students

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Stránský conducts tours of Auschwitz.
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As Holocaust survivor Oldřich Stránský recounts walking through the Auschwitz concentration camp with a group of 18-year-olds recently, he remembers seeing the fascination and horror in their eyes.

“I told them my memories of how hard things were,” says Stránský, who was in his early 20s when he was imprisoned there.
For two hours, the group of about 100 Czech and Slovak students hung on Stránský’s every word. He talked about what it was like to work in the camp, with its gas chambers, back-breaking labor, the SS guards’ brutality and the extreme conditions that killed hundreds of prisoners who weren’t gassed.
“This is the most effective way to pass on the experience to others — in person, at Auschwitz,” he says.
The Czech-German Fund for the Future has financed much of Stránský’s work teaching students what happened under the murderous Nazi regime. Many of his contemporaries doubt the value of his efforts, he says, or find it hard to get around like they did in the days when they went to schools to talk about their experiences during World War II. But Stránský harbors no doubts.
“Nobody was tired of listening the entire time,” he says of his last session with students at Auschwitz.
At 87, Stránský is also keenly aware that he and the few other survivors are not going to be around much longer to tell their stories. So he is organizing a project to pass on their personal stories of the camps to high school teachers, who in turn can relay them to students for many years to come.
“We need to connect with the younger generation, and we can’t take every single young person to Auschwitz,” Stránský notes with a smile.
With support from the Czech-German Fund, he also plans to create a repository of personal documents and other materials from World War II.
Stránský is a straightforward man who is not afraid to show the tattooed number on his arm to anyone who asks about it. It’s a chilling symbol of what happened to him, he says, and while he is alive, no one will forget it.
— Beth Potter

Benjamin Thomas Cunningham can be reached at bcunningham@praguepost.com


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