Inside Post Bellum: Martin Kroupa on preserving memory in a divided age

A mission, not just a project

When Martin Kroupa speaks about Memory of Nations — the vast oral history archive built by the Czech NGO Post Bellum — he does not describe it as an institutional project or a professional obligation. For him, it is something far more personal.

“Every meeting is very touching,” he says. “Every human being likes to hear stories. And the real ones are somewhere inside us. It’s a way of understanding the world. For us, it’s not really a job. It’s a mission.”

Post Bellum began in the early 2000s with a simple but urgent idea: to record the full life stories of people whose experiences shaped 20th-century Central Europe. What started with Czech Second World War veterans soon expanded to include political prisoners of the 1950s, signatories of Charter 77, Holocaust survivors, and many others. Today, the Memory of Nations archive contains roughly 17,000 recorded testimonies — one of the largest oral history collections of its kind in Europe.

Unlike many projects abroad that focus on a single group or specific historical event, Memory of Nations deliberately combines diverse experiences. Veterans, dissidents, collaborators, victims, bystanders — all are part of the same mosaic. The connecting thread, Kroupa suggests, is a shared confrontation with power and freedom.

Memory, truth and verification

But recording memory is not the same as writing history. Eyewitnesses often remember the same event differently — even when they stood side by side. “If you put three people together who were definitely at the same event, each of them remembers it differently,” Kroupa notes. “That’s why we focus on the subjective point of view. You cannot speak about one huge story as something objective. Human stories are not stones or trees – they are lived experiences.”

This emphasis on subjectivity does not mean abandoning verification. On the contrary, Post Bellum works extensively with archival sources, including records from the communist-era secret police. The Czech Republic’s relatively open access to these archives allows researchers to cross-check claims and confront inconsistencies.

“The subjective point of view is very important, but we are trying to verify it,” Kroupa explains. “Sometimes we say: ‘We looked at the archive, and there is a discrepancy here.’ And for many people, it’s a shock – they didn’t know it could be verified. But this is also part of recording a human life.”

That tension between memory and documentation can be emotionally demanding. Interviews often reach painful moments — particularly when speaking with people who experienced war, imprisonment or persecution.

Kroupa recalls one recording from years ago with a former soldier who had fought on the Eastern Front. As they spoke about his unit, the man began to cry.

“In that moment, you cannot do anything,” Kroupa says. “But when you ask questions differently, you break the protective barriers people build inside themselves – and you get deeper.”

Independence and the politics of the past

Finding that balance — between empathy and inquiry, between respect and verification — is central to the project’s philosophy. The team typically conducts multiple sessions with each witness: one allowing the story to unfold naturally, another returning to specific episodes in greater detail. The result preserves both spontaneity and scrutiny.

Over the years, Memory of Nations has grown far beyond Prague. Post Bellum now operates eight regional branches across the Czech Republic, along with additional teams in Slovakia and Ukraine. Each region brings its own historical layers — from the legacy of the Sudetenland and the expulsion of German-speaking inhabitants after the Second World War, to local memories of communism, resistance and collaboration.

For Kroupa, this regional diversity reinforces a fundamental insight: there is no single, uniform national narrative. The Czech Republic, he argues, is “very varied,” and its stories reflect that complexity.

The project’s independence has also been essential to its credibility. More than half of its funding comes directly from thousands of private donors who contribute monthly. This public backing allows Post Bellum to address politically sensitive topics — including collaboration with the secret police or controversial figures from the past — without relying exclusively on state grants.

History, after all, is rarely neutral territory. In a time of political polarization and rapid digital communication, oral testimony can become both a source of reconciliation and of renewed debate.

Social media, Kroupa admits, has changed how stories are shared. Short excerpts circulate widely online. But he insists that the deeper value lies beyond the clip. The goal is not merely to produce fragments for quick consumption, but to invite people to engage with entire life stories — to listen, reflect, and confront complexity.

Ultimately, the work of Memory of Nations rests on a simple yet demanding premise: that understanding the present requires listening carefully to those who lived through the past. Not to extract a single definitive truth, but to preserve the human texture of history — with all its contradictions, emotions and unfinished conversations.