The Last Train: Drama of the Powerless

Recently released film from the Czech-German co-production THE LAST TRAIN, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier and his wife Dana Vavrova, is one of the many movies that dedicate their story to the Second World War. This time we will not see masses of soldiers and strategic battle preparation, almost the whole film takes place in a train which transports the last Jewish citizens of Berlin to the concentration camp. Completely purified Berlin was a Goebbels‘ present for Hitler's birthday in 1943.

The train left the Berlin station Grünewald with the last 688 Jewish people who stayed in 1943 in the German capital. They were mainly from the prominent rich families who were really surprised by the sudden Gestapo attack in their homes.
The Last Train dedicates its attention to the ‘passengers’ in one of the compartments of the train. During two hours we can become familiar with different personalities and different strategies how they coop with a given situation. Some of them hope almost until the arrival to the concentration camp that they will be able to live; the others plan to escape from the beginning of the journey. The tiny space of the train compartment gave the authors of the film a possibility to show ‘little’ human tragedies. The main characters express real deepness and very human dimension. The film honors the people of which spoke in his memories Viktor E. Frankl: ‘Even if there were few of them, they are the example that in the concentration camp they can take everything from a man except one thing: the highest human dignity…’

We could ask ourselves a question why to go to the cinema and see the movies that fulfill us with terror and anxiety? Why to remind ourselves the horrors of the past times? But on contrary, the tragedy of many millions of dead people has to be constantly reminded to us, mainly today, when we concentrate so much on the present moment. It was not always so common to live in such a wealthy society and we should not forget the path that led us to the current richness. The permanent reminder of sufferings of European nations should create in us empathy with the suffering of many other nations today.

Inter-religious meditation during the Forum 2000 conference

From the October 7th until the October 9th 2007 the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague, was the host of thousands of prominent guests from all around the world who participated in the 11th annual Forum 2000 Conference.

During the meetings that were this year dedicated to a topic: Freedom and Responsibility was many times reminded a current situation in Burma. Vaclav Havel, the ex-president of Czech Republic, asked all the participants to support the people in Burma by signing a petition and Farish Ahmad-Noor, Malaysian political scientist, mentioned that a task of all religious people today is to tell the truth to the ‘worldly power’ as it was done by the monks in Burma recently.
Every year a meeting of representatives of the religions of the world takes place and this year it was participated by many important delegates of all three Abraham traditions religions: Hebraism, Christianity and Islam. One of the topics of a discussion was an inseparability of the religion and politics. Czech catholic priest Tomas Halik reminded that religion is a source of values and it creates an ambience for the life in our society.
The conference was concluded by the inter-religious meditation in the roman-catholic parish of Saint Salvatore. The crowded church witnessed how the representatives of Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds lit together a candle as a sign of a faith in one common God.

The Forum 2000 was founded in 1996 as a joint initiative of the Czech President Václav Havel, Japanese philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. Since 1997, Forum 2000 has organized annual conferences held in Prague which have attracted important thought leaders, Nobel laureates, politicians, business leaders and many others, whose common denominative is experience with bearing responsibility. Their effort to search for the responses to significant global issues culminated in the adoption of the Second Prague Declaration, which briefly sums up the world’s current state and concludes with the words: „Today it is not enough only to observe and describe what is threatening us. It is not enough to talk about hope. The only way is a pragmatic meeting and a free acceptance of our obligation to have a dialogue with everybody and about everything which we consider to be conditions of our common freedom and responsibility in our interconnected world“.