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.

The grandson of British wartime leader Winston Churchill has unveiled a statue in the Czech capital Prague dedicated to the 2,500 Czech and Slovak airmen who fought in Britain’s Royal Air Force. The monument, called the Winged Lion, is a gift from Prague’s British expatriate community in gratitude for the airmen’s contribution during World War Two.

The assassination of senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak paratroopers Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík in 1942 was one of the outstanding feats of daring in World War Two. The killing led to terrible reprisals, not least for the pair themselves, who were surrounded and killed by the Germans. But one question has long troubled historians: where are their bodies?

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.

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.

The so-called Velvet Revolution precipitated the end of communism in Czechoslovakia. Three locations in Prague symbolise the regime and its downfall. They include a controversial statue to Ivan Stepanovich Konev, the Soviet general whose forces liberated much of the country in 1945, but also oversaw the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

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.

Czech-Russian relations were already chilly before the invasion of Ukraine; today they are icy, verging on frozen. Revelations that Moscow’s notorious GRU spy agency had blown up a Czech arms dump in 2014 led to a spate of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions. The annual flashpoint is the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia – or rather the eastern two-thirds of it.

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.

Demolition work is to start on a Czech pig farm built on the site of a Nazi-era concentration camp for Roma. It ends decades of often bitter dispute between the farm’s owners, the government and Roma rights groups. The camp was staffed by Czech guards, rather than the Nazi SS, and none of them were convicted after the war.

Robert Fico might have promised to send “not one more round of ammunition” to Ukraine, but he wasn’t speaking for all Slovaks. When the government cut off state-supplied military aid, citizens banded together, raising €1m for artillery shells within 48 hours. They included Otto Simko, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor and veteran of the Slovak National Uprising.

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.