ROB CAMERON

The story of the late Nicholas Winton, the British stockbroker who helped save hundreds of mostly Jewish children from the Nazis, has been immortalised in books, documentaries and films – most recently One Life. In 2011, Sir Nicholas was in Prague to attend the premiere of the film Nicky’s Family, and to meet some of those he had helped to save.

Plans to rehabilitate a pre-war Jewish cemetery in the Czech town of Prostějov have run into fierce local opposition, torpedoed by deliberate misinformation and anti-Semitism. Tombstones from the town’s old Jewish cemetery were looted and handed out to locals in 1943 – and many of them still pave people’s backyards and cellars.

A class photo from a primary school in the northern city of Teplice led to a torrent of abuse and even death threats. The photo, of first graders at ZŠ Plynárenská primary school, showed rows of happy, smiling children with one difference – only a handful of them were white. Teplice is home to a large Roma minority, and also has many immigrants from Vietnam and Gulf states.

For a quarter of a century tourists and locals passing through the bottom of Prague’s Wenceslas Square were stepping unaware on Jewish gravestones. They were looted from abandoned cemeteries in the 1980s and cut up to make cobbles. The truth about the stones came to light thanks to the head of Prague’s Jewish Museum – who slipped a few into his pocket as a young man.

Governments everywhere are struggling to vaccinate their citizens against Covid, partly due to public resistance and disinformation. Czech anti-vaxxers made international headlines by wearing yellow Stars of David. The message was clear: those who refuse the Covid vaccine will be ostracised just as Jews were in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

150,000 Jews from across Europe were interned in the Terezín – or Theresienstadt – ghetto during WW2. It was a transit camp – where Jews were gathered before being sent eastwards to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps. Conditions at Terezín were horrific, and some 35,000 died there. But eighty years on, the buildings themselves are falling into ruin.

Councillors in the Slovak village of Varin have rejected a request from state prosecutors to rename the country’s sole street sign honouring Slovakia’s wartime fascist leader, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. The village – in the Zilina region – bears a street named “Dr Jozef Tiso Street”. Earlier this year, activists tore down the street sign in the latest instalment in a long-running saga.

Milena Fleischmann was nine when she boarded a train in Prague to begin a new life in England. She was clutching a card, showing she had been granted leave by His Majesty’s Government to enter the U.K. – one of only a handful of Jewish children allowed to do so. Only decades later did she learn that her escape from the Nazis had been organised by Sir Nicholas Winton.