Controversial Czech reality show set during Nazi occupation

Holiday in the Protectorate will depict the brutality of life under Nazi occupation, with three generations of a family taking part.

The family will be made to perform tasks like harvesting crops and milking cows as well as specifically wartime requests like sewing blackout curtains and building a basement air-raid shelter.

A cash prize is offered if they can last two months.

We don’t want to people to act, we don’t want to pretend that they are scared
Zora Cejnkova, Director

The show will force them to endure the food rationing and frequent hunger that were normal during the second world war.

They will also face simulated air-raids and intimidation by “Nazi informants” as well as interrogations by the Gestapo.

There will be eight one hour-long episodes of “Holiday in the Protectorate” aired over the coming weeks.

Zora Cejnkova, Director of the show, says “People somehow don’t believe that it is possible to show the situation with all the constraints, with the fear, with the hate to the Nazis.”

“Of course we are not pretending, everybody knows that this is not 1939. We don’t want to people to act, we don’t want to pretend that they are scared. That’s absolutely not what the story is about.”

In March 1939 Hitler established the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” in what is now the Czech Republic, it would last until the fall of the Third Reich in 1945.

The regime removed Jews from the civil service and banned trade unions.

The Jewish population was virtually destroyed, of 120,000 in the 1930s census 75,000 were murdered.