Posters in Prague warn against racism, xenophobia

Posters with texts based on Nazi anti-Jewish laws from the war-time Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia recently appeared across Prague warning people against the danger of racism and xenophobia in a campaign organised by the Jewish Museum in Prague.

The yellow-coloured texts are an ironic interpretation of the absurd bans concerning Jews dozens of which were issued during the Nazi occupation.

"Skinhead persons are banned from visiting public libraries," "Blue-eyed persons are banned from the use of public telephones," or "Adult persons of small height are only allowed to do shopping between 15:00 and 17:00" some slogans say.

They are designed to warn Praguers against the present discrimination against certain groups of the population that people can come across.

The campaign is organised within the commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day, honouring the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust in World War Two.

The world marks Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the day of the liberation of the Osvetim (Auschwitz) Nazi extermination camp.

The poster campaign in Prague is held two months after the Czech police frustrated the planned neo-Nazi march through Prague's historic Jewish Quarter on November 10, the anniversary day of Kristallnacht, the 1938 anti-Jew pogrom in Nazi Germany.

It is taking place shortly after the day on which rightist extremists in Plzen, west Bohemia, wanted to organise a march through the town that was eventually banned by the authorities.

The neo-Nazis in Plzen wanted to stage their event on January 19, the date connected with the first transport of Jews from Plzen to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, north Bohemia, that was dispatched on January 18, 1942.

Out of 2605 Jews on the transport only 112 survived the war.

"We are glad that we can appeal to public opinion after these events," Miroslava Ludvikova, from the Jewish Museum, told CTK.

The poster campaign that started on January 15 and will last through February 11 is mainly aimed at young people who, according to the organisers, know little about the anti-Jewish persecution in 1939-1945.