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The village of Nehvizdy, in central Bohemia, on Wednesday commemorated the 70th anniversary of the start of Operation Anthropoid, the targeted killing of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. Two Czechoslovak commandoes who carried out the killing, landed near the village on the night of 28 December, 1941.

For all the suffering that Bohemia and Moravia endured during WWII, relatively little of the damage was physical. Prague escaped the terrible bombing that left so many of the ancient cities of Europe wasted. There were incidents, however - two in particular in the last year of the war that brought large-scale destruction and great loss of life.

It's exactly seventy years since the first transport of Czechoslovak Jews left Prague, bound for the garrison town of Terezín, transformed by the Nazis into a ghetto and concentration camp. Some 140,000 Jewish men, women and children were sent to Terezín, known as Theresienstadt in German; most of them were later killed at Auschwitz. A number of events were held this week bringing together Terezín survivors, one of them on Thursday evening at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.

In today’s Special our guest is the charming Eva Jiránková, born in 1921 to a notable Prague family in the early years of the First Republic. As a junior, Jiránková was a competitive skier and as a young woman she graced the covers of popular Czech magazines – something of a charmed life. But that all that ended in September 1942 when her husband, Miloš Jiránek, was arrested by the Gestapo, and spent the next years in internment and concentration camps.

The military section of Prague’s Olšany Cemetery filled with foreign uniforms on Sunday as soldiers of the Commonwealth of Nations marked Remembrance Day, and commemorated the sacrifices of their countrymen who lost their lives on Czech territory during the Second World War.

Military officials and war veterans from the Czech Republic and Commonwealth countries including Great Britain, Australia, India, Ghana and Pakistan, gathered at Prague's Olšany Commonwealth War Cemetery on Sunday to pay tribute to soldiers killed in the Second World War. An Anglican priest led a commemorative ceremony and wreaths were laid on the graves of Commonwealth soldiers' who died on Czech soil. A British representative at the ceremony highlighted the strong link between Czech and British war veterans: over two and a half thousand Czechoslovak pilots flew with the RAF in the course of WWII.

WWII veteran and hero Marie Ljalková-Lastovecká died on Monday at the age of 90, the Czechoslovak Community of Legionnaires as announced. A Czech from the Ukrainian region of Volhynia, Ljalková-Lastovecká was the first Czechoslovak woman to be put into battle in the war. She served as a sniper during the Battle of Sokolovo, where she neutralised four Nazi machine gunners and gained fame in the Soviet and Anglo-American press. For that deed and thirty other successful kills she was awarded the Czechoslovak War Cross and the Soviet Order of the Red Star. Last year she received the highest distinction of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion, from President Václav Klaus.

A. J. P. Taylor (1906-1990) was one of the best-known and most influential British historians of the 20th century. He is remembered in particular for his provocative left-wing political views and his conviction that German history made the country uniquely inclined towards aggression and expansionism. This made him an ardent opponent of attempts to rebuild Germany’s economy after the war, and a strong supporter of Czechoslovakia’s growing alliance with the Soviet Union. In July 1946, just after elections which saw the Communists emerge as the strongest single

During World War II, the political left in Britain and the United States had come to identify itself strongly with the fate of the Czech nation. This was partly a reaction to the shame of Munich in 1938, when Czechoslovakia had been abandoned by her allies, and it was reinforced by the role played by the British miners in launching the Lidice Shall Live movement. This had followed the Nazis’ destruction of the Czech mining village of Lidice in June 1942. In this spirit the president of the British Miners’ Federation Will Lawther, came at the end

A journalist, Václav Vlk, has raised a theory that a group of Sudeten German civilians killed in Dobrotín just after WWII were actually murdered by a local German communist, Robert Kautzinger, and his two sons. Mr Vlk told Czech Television that the massacre of 17 Germans in the days following the fall of the Third Reich was an act of revenge for Kautzinger’s having been sent to a concentration camp by local Nazis. The police investigator on the case still believes the murders were carried out by Czechs as vengeance killings.