Message from the Project Leader

Looking back, I must admit that I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I inspired my pupils to participate in the project of the Jewish Museum in Prague's Educational and Cultural Centre titled "The Neighbours Who Disappeared". I knew I could not aspire to do any professional research with 13-year-old children, but I wanted to teach them some of the basic principles of scientific research, such as data collection and classification and critical evaluation. It seemed ideal to use the topic of the holocaust for this purpose as it is still relevant even now, nearly sixty years after the end of WWII.

The carefully prepared Project plan was washed away by flooding in August and the plan drawn up to replace it was not proving very useful as our research continued. In short, every few weeks we started anew. Where we seemed to "strike gold" only a few sporadic grains appeared, whilst elsewhere a beautiful nugget appeared in what had seemed like nothing. I guess we can now all imagine what gold diggers must have felt like.

I chose to present the outcome of our work in the form of stories. They tell us about people who lived their lives, went to school, took dancing lessons, and conducted their business in places we all know very well, only to disappear overnight without any reason or culpability, never to appear again.

This format gives us a kind of alibi. It is not easy to ascertain truth and we cannot claim that something which is supported only by the pillars of human memory is one hundred percent true. Our eyewitnesses often contradicted each another and what they agreed about cannot be proven by archive data. We tried to find proof from many sources for all the information that we decided to use in our stories. However, should there be, among our readers, anybody who sees the issues from a different point of view, as we are sure there will be, we can only ask them to write down their memories and send them to the archive of the Jewish Museum in Prague.

I would like to thank the pupils who made up the research team for their enthusiasm and accuracy since the very beginning. Thanks also go to their parents for their understanding, without which we would have not been able to participate in the Project and to the headmaster of our school, Zámecká Basic School in Litomyšl, for his helpfulness and tolerance.

Last but not least I would like to thank my husband for his endless patience.

Dagmar Burdová