Witness: Witness Archive 2017

In March 2001 thousands of sex workers gathered in the Indian city of Kolkata for a festival organised to improve their rights and counter the stigma they faced. Sex worker groups across the world now celebrate this day in March as an annual event. Farhana Haider has been speaking to a former prostitute, Bharati Dey, who took part in the gathering. Photo: Sex workers from around the world relax during the Sex Workers' Freedom Festival in Kolkata 2012. Credit: DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images

On March 15th 1939, the German army occupied Czechoslovakia. Witness hears the story of one young boy who watched the German troops march into Prague and who later escaped on the Kindertransport. These were trains that brought thousands of mostly Jewish children out of Austria, Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, without their parents, to safety in Britain. That young boy went on to become a British MP and today sits in Britain's House of Lords; Alf Dubs tells Louise Hidalgo his story. Picture: German troops enter the centre of Prague on 15th March 1939; the German leader Adolf Hitler visited the city the next day. (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

A hundred years ago, photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii travelled around the Russian Empire taking the first colour photographs of a world that was about to be swept away by the Bolshevik Revolution. Using a unique method of colour photography, which he had developed, he managed to capture images previously never seen. Dina Newman speaks to Michel Soussaline, Prokudin-Gorskii's grandson. Photo: Peasant Girls, 1909. Credit: Library of Congress; Famille Procoudine-Gorsky.

In March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated ending centuries of autocratic royal rule in Russia. The revolution started with demonstrations in the capital Petrograd (St. Petersburg) against the First World War and shortages of food. Troops joined the protestors in the streets, A Provisional Government was set up to replace Tsarist rule but it had to share power with a new Council of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, called the Petrograd Soviet. Hear eyewitness accounts of the revolution from the BBC radio archive. Photo: 12th March 1917: Barricades across a street in St Petersburg, as a red flag floats above the cannons, during the Russian Revolution. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the early days of Aids, a misunderstanding made one man the face of the epidemic. French-Canadian air steward Gaetan Dugas developed the symptoms of HIV/Aids in the early 1980s, but a misreading of scientific data led to him being identified as "Patient Zero", giving the mistaken impression he was responsible for the spread of the disease. Lucy Burns speaks to researcher William Darrow, who worked on the epidemic, and to Gaetan Dugas' friend Rand Gaynor. Photo: Gaetan Dugas. Credit: Rand Gaynor)

In March 1977 a group of American Muslims took over a hundred people hostage in Washington. The siege ended after ambassadors from three Islamic countries helped with the negotiations. Simon Watts has been speaking to Paul Green, one of the hostages who was held for almost 40 hours. PHOTO: Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the leader of the hostage-takers, arriving for a court hearing in Washington with his wives (AP)

Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the world's most influential female artists - in 2014, her painting "Jimson Weed" sold for the highest price ever paid for a work by a woman. Famous for her vivid oil paintings of flowers, landscapes and animal skulls, she lived and worked in the wild dry canyons and deserts of New Mexico in the southern United States. Lucy Burns speaks to her former assistant Agapita Judy Lopez. PICTURE: Journalists view 'Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1' by Georgia O'Keeffe at Tate Modern on July 4, 2016 in London, England. (Rob Stothard/Getty Images)

In the 1970s and 80s a deadly cocktail of toxic factory fumes and car pollution turned Mexico City into the world’s most polluted city. In response, the authorities came up with an ambitious solution: curb the use of each of the city’s two million cars for one day a week, the first time any country had tried such a bold plan. Ramon Ojeda Mestre is an environmentalist who was behind the initiative, introduced in November 1989. He tells Mike Lanchin about overcoming fierce opposition to the plan, and how some critics even predicted riots from irate motorists. (Photo credit: Alamy)

On 7 March 2005 a group of women held an unprecedented rally outside the Kuwaiti parliament. They were trying to force the all-male body to change the electoral law. Two months later they succeeded. Zeinab Dabaa has been hearing from Rola Dashti, one of the organisers of the protest, who later became one of the first women to be elected to her country's legislature. (Photo: Kuwaiti candidates for the 2006 parliamentary election, Aisha al-Rashid (R) and Rola Dashti (C), the first ever women to be allowed to stand for office Credit: Yasser al-Zayya/AFP/Getty Images)

During World War One, two British nurses set up a first aid station just a few hundred metres behind the trenches of the Western Front. Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker became known as “the Madonnas of Pervyse”. Mairi Chisholm spoke to the BBC in 1977. (Photo: Mairi Chisholm (left) and Elsie Knocker. courtesy of Dr Diane Atkinson, author of Elsie and Mairi Go To War)

In 1998 someone cut the head off the most famous statue in Denmark. Inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, it's a bronze figure of a girl sitting on a rock in Copenhagen harbour. After a police search to find the head, it was Peter Jensen's job to reattach it to the mermaid's body. Photo: The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbour. Credit: Reuters/Bob Strong.

On March 4th 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt became America's First Lady, a role she transformed during the 12 years that her husband Franklin D Roosevelt was president. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to her granddaughter and namesake, Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves, who with her young brother lived for a while with her grandparents in the White House. Photograph: Eleanor Roosevelt at a United Nations conference in New York in 1946. She was appointed as a representative to the UN following her husband's death in office in 1945. (Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)

In 1951 cells taken from an African American woman suffering from cancer were found to be unique because they carried on reproducing endlessly in the laboratory. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951. Cultures from her cells have since been used to provide medical breakthroughs but as Farhana Haider reports, Henrietta Lacks was never asked if her cells could be used in medical research. (Photo: Henrietta Lacks. Copyright: Lacks Family)

In March 1997 Mother Teresa retired from her charity work in India just 6 months before she died. She had devoted her life to working in Kolkata's poorest slums and in 2016, Pope Francis declared her "Saint Teresa of Calcutta". Mari Marcel Thekaekara lived around the corner from Mother Teresa's orphanage and volunteered there as a child, she told Rebecca Kesby about that experience, her own faith, and how she felt conflicted about Mother Teresa’s methods. (PHOTO: AP Mother Teresa holds a child in 1978)

In 1997 obesity was first recognised as a global problem when the World Health Organisation first agreed to discuss the issue. Researchers had discovered startling information about an increase in the number of overweight people in the developing world. The consultation was led by a group calling itself the International Obesity Task Force which was led by Professor Philip James. He's been telling Claire Bowes how he had to persuade the WHO that areas of the world struggling with malnutrition were now also suffering from obesity. PHOTO: BBC Copyright.

The story of the 1992 film which launched Nigeria's hugely successful movie industry known as Nollywood. The film was called "Living in Bondage". We speak to one of the stars of the film, Kanayo O. Kanayo. Photo: Kanayo O. Kanayo (Kanayo)

Valya Chervenyashka was tortured in a Libyan jail and accused of infecting hundreds of children with HIV in hospital. She spent eight years in prison and was sentenced to death three times. She tells her story to Dina Newman. Photo: Nurses Valya Chervenyashka (front) and Snezhana Dimitrova on trial at the High Court in Tripoli, August 2006. Credit: AFP/Getty Images.

In the 1930s, a group of German-American Nazi sympathisers known as the German American Bund held rallies and summer camps across the US. In Feburary 1939, they held a meeting for 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York. Lucy Burns speaks to Skip Eernisse, who remembers the Bund summer camp Camp Hindenburg in his home town of Grafton, Wisconsin. We also hear from Arnie Bernstein, author of Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German American Bund. (Photo: German-American Nazi sympathisers rally in the US. Credit: Library of Congress)

In February 1990 half of the original manuscript of one of America's best loved books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, was found in an attic in Hollywood. The handwritten document had laid undiscovered for a century. Rachael Gillman has been speaking to Pam Lindholm, whose sister made the discovery.

In February 2002 the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, went on trial for war crimes committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The man once known as the 'butcher of the Balkans' would die in prison before the trial had concluded. Louise Hidalgo has been speaking to two lawyers, Zdenko Tomanovic and Steven Kay QC, who worked on his defence. Photo: Slobodan Milosevic in the courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, The Netherlands, February 2002. (PAUL VREEKER/AFP/Getty Images)