Post Bellum

Post Bellum is a Czech educational non-profit organization, founded in 2001. The organisation was formed by a group of historians and journalists, with the aim of increasing public knowledge of the 20th Century history of the Czech Republic and neighbouring countries, especially among younger generations. Post Bellum has collected thousands of witness accounts by conducting interviews with people who lived through significant periods in history, as part of their documentation project, Stories of the 20th Century. They also organise various other projects and activities to raise awareness of modern history. Post Bellum is an associate member organisation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.

Written by Mikuláš Kroupa and Adam Drda, Stories of the 20th Century documents historical turning points of the century through the personal anecdotes and memories of witnesses. Post Bellum has collected thousands of witness accounts through interviews, and the project has become the largest collection of oral historical interviews in the country, archived by text or electronically. The people interviewed include war veterans, Holocaust survivors, political prisoners of Nazi and Communist times, and members of minority groups. The project is regularly broadcast on Czech Radio, featuring a different story each week.

Another Post Bellum project is Memory of Nations, organised in partnership with Czech Radio, and the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Czech Radio provides the technical support to carry out the interviews and witness recordings. Witnesses are interviewed in their original language, then translated into English. The interviews are then archived online, where they can be browsed using different categories, dates, places, and so on, in order to locate anecdotes and interviews regarding specific events. The organisation has also developed an app, with an interactive map allowing users to access archive materials related to their current location. As of January 2015, the project has more than 2100 published witness accounts in several languages, with more than 24,000 pictures.

The Memory of Nations Award is awarded to five recipients annually, since 2010. They are chosen from a total of twenty nominees by a panel of judges from the fields of historical research, journalism, or politics. In November 2014, the award was presented to people involved in resistance to the Iron Curtain in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Germany, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of communism in Europe.

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