Czechoslovakia

The Columbia Broadcasting System presents... One World Flight. No, right, exactly what is going here and we are. We don't know what is going in America, what is going in America, what are the conditions and so on, especially social conditions.

You are listening to Edward Benish, President of Czechoslovakia, speaking at his desk in the Presidential Office of the Rachani Palace in Prague Czechoslovakia. During an interview with the CBS Playwright producer, Norman Corwin. The voice of Mr. Banish is one among several authentic sounds and voices recorded inside Czechoslovakia.

To be heard on this sixth of a series of thirteen broadcasts, based on Mr. Corwin's recent 37,000-mile global trip, as first winner of the One World Flight Award. This is Norman Corwin. From Moscow to Prague, there's a distance of about 1,200 miles as a plane flies, And on a day in late July, an unsettled day in which the weather changed from country to country,

we flew that leg of the One World Flight. The land beneath us, with its frequent streams and rivers, looked as green and innocent as though it had never heard the names of old wars, nor the rumour of new ones.

Yet not long ago, over every inch of the distance we were consuming so quickly and comfortably, armies had fought. Blood had mixed in the streams and rivers, villages had been sacked, cities bond, a dead man for every thought of the way.

We flew over white Russia, Poland, a thin slice of Germany, crossed the Czech border and soon cited the Viltava, better known through music as the River Moldal, coiling around the terraced hills of Bohemia. And then, in a matter of minutes, the towers, bridges, rooftops, chimney pots of Prague.