The Festival of Tolerance took place in Terezin (Czech Republic) from 21.9.2000 to 25.9.2000. Young students from many European countries came there and stayed in one of the reconstructed barracks in order to talk about the problems of the today's world and find out something new about the dark side of history.

The festival was a unique opportunity to absorb lots of new opinions, find out different points of view on the difficulties of common life and meet students from different countries at the same time. The program consisted of different activities which demanded on the participants more than just passive observing and listening. The participants were asked for their own opinions and personal experiences. And so they were more or less taken into the questions and forced to think about them. But "forced" only in a positive way. Nobody was asked for world-changing ideas and extremely deep thoughts. The human way of treating problems was appreciated, not the academic one. We learned how to express our feelings about the given themes, we played games that helped us percieve our environment not only with our own eyes. We tried to imagine ourselves to be the jewish inhabitants of Terezin and understand their feelings. This approach helps you to understand better different events from history and the today's world. To understand not only in the logical way but also emotionally and that's what is often ignored by the traditional scholar system. We learned how to forget the stereotypes of our behavior, express ourselves, think about our thoughts and understand the thoughts of others at the same time. It's the lack of comprehension and wrong ways of thinking that make the people judge the others and not be tolerant. This way of approach to the problem was very convenient, we think. The participants didn't speak only about tolerance but - and that's the main goal - also learned how to be tolerant, although many didn't even notice.

Four days were quite a short time to absorb all this new experiences and impulses which we were recieving there. We often didn't think about the ideas which we shared there until we came back home. This was maybe a goal of the organizers: On the festival, there was given a fertile ground for thoughts that the participants then took back to their homes where they can think about them and talk about them with their fellowman. So the thoughts of Terezin are spread to the world that surrounds us.

In Terezin we of couse made use also of finding out more about the history of the place. We made a tour around the city and visited two museums which focused on the terrible things that happened there. We found new information on the exhibitions and also new questions rose. We discussed that later on and tried to express them by words or drama. On the last day of the festival there was a final drama preformed, invented and acted by all the Terezin festival participants.

The participation on the Festival of tolerance made us more thoughtful about the world around us and we are very glad that we took part. We appreciated the appropriate schedule and the useful contents of the different workshops. We are also very glad to be given the possibility to meet new students from different countries and compare what we have in common and in what differ from each other.