Jakub Szántó

* 1977

  • "Politics has stopped being about ideas. Politics has ceased to be about ideas and long-term things, about long-term direction. Where are we going? Do we want to be an assembly plant? Do we want to be IT? We want to be modern and maintain a top-notch school system where salaries are high, where there are well thought out options for principals to decide what's next, how they're going to teach these kids. That's a lot of things, and there's no consensus on that. Every government that comes in only comes in with those four years. It's looking four years ahead at most and that's just wrong."

  • "I just don't imagine automatically helping people who are fleeing their homes, for example from the war in Syria, that we will simply accept 50 000, 100 000 refugees here. I don't think so. I think there's a relatively large space in between giving up on them altogether and giving them our living room. And I'm proud to be from a country that does that. I have mapped Czech humanitarian and development aid to Syrian refugees and poor Jordanians in Jordan quite extensively and in detail in the five years I have been in the Middle East. And what we did there is just fantastic. And we can really be proud, because the numbers of people who have been helped by our targeted aid, specific projects, specific things that can be touched, not just paying the bills, as richer countries do, the numbers of people who have been helped by the Czech Republic are in the tens of thousands. And that's really not a small number for a country that can't spend that much."

  • "Václav Havel is definitely a man who belongs among the giants of Czech history, a man who, by combining his strength with his human weaknesses, is terribly interesting. That he is not a man of granite, but that he is a man who had a lot of human weaknesses. That all of this combined, and if I compare him to, say, Lech Walesa, or Lansbergis, the great figures of the anti-communist revolutions, he had something extra, and that was that he was a playwright who had a sense of a certain theatricality. And I know also from witnesses that he really took care, he paid a lot of attention to, let's say, the dramatic effect, the drama of the politics. In that, I think, he was quite exceptional."

  • "I think the compromise that was chosen in our country was not entirely appropriate. And that indeed the, I won't say Stalinist... rather perhaps Brezhnev-style leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the KSČ, which has been transformed into what is today the KSČM, the pure fact that somebody can be proudly here and quite brazenly act even as a deputy chairman of the Chamber of Deputies with that name Communist, is something that was not good and it was quite a fundamental mistake. If the party had been called the Democratic Left, or whatever, and the same people had been there, it might not have made such a difference in reality, but simply the fact that there remains the possibility, even though we have a law that is theoretically supposed to combat the promotion of ideologies that lead to human rights abuses and so on, such as Nazism and of course Communism, we are essentially denying our own legal order by the existence of such a party."

  • "I've read a lot about terrorism, and I have to say that it's a phenomenon that in a way, it sounds silly, never ceases to fascinate me. It's just philosophically and historically an activity that's quite different from war, where actually the means are very similar and where the victims are very identical, but where the murderous violence, as opposed to the murder that's against that particular person, this anonymous violence, or violence against people that I know nothing about, is quite different from war. The arrogance, the hatred, the condescension towards innocent victims. That those people just deserve to die because I decided to do so for some reason, or those people, those victims, have to endure it as part of some higher idea, is just a thing or a philosophical concept that doesn't give me sleep."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 28.06.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:45:22
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 15.07.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:26:33
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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I have a few images in my head that I won’t erase for the rest of my life.

Jakub Szántó at the Václav Havel Library, 2020
Jakub Szántó at the Václav Havel Library, 2020
photo: Archive of Jakub Szánt

Jakub Szántó was born on 11 March 1977 in Prague. After his parents divorced in 1986, he moved to Moscow with his mother Eva, a university professor. He lived through the 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia as a teenager in Moscow. In his youth, he was a top swimmer. He has always been interested in history and was drawn to the Middle East because of his Jewish roots. He and his mother returned to Prague in 1990 and after elementary school he began studying at the Jan Kepler Gymnasium. He then graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences, majoring in International Area Studies. In 1999 he joined the foreign editorial office of TV Nova. In 2001, he worked with colleagues on the 9/11 terrorist attack on the twin towers. For the first time, he began to travel to war zones (Afghanistan, Iraq). In 2006 he moved to the foreign desk of Czech Television. In 2013, he went to Tel Aviv with his family as a permanent foreign correspondent and became an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2018, he and his family returned to Prague. In 2018, he wrote his first book Behind the Curtain of War, for which he won the Magnesia Litera Readers’ Choice Award. In 2020, his second book, From Izrastina with Love - A Reporter Between Two Countries, was published. His wife Lenka Szántó is a successful journalist and screenwriter. Together they are raising two sons. In 2021 Jakub Szántó worked as a foreign correspondent for Czech Television and hosted the programme Horizont on ČT24.