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Dozens of alumni of the Czechoslovak state schools set up in the United Kingdom by the wartime government in exile arrived in Prague this week—along with file boxes stuffed full of treasured keepsakes from those childhood days in perilous times. The former refugees came to donate their class photographs, report cards, school newspapers, diaries and other mementos to the Czech National Archives' collection.

Every year at this time the Czech Republic commemorates one of the most horrific atrocities committed on Czech territory during World War II. On 10th June 1942, at the height of the German occupation, the quiet village of Lidice, some 20 kilometres west of Prague, was razed to the ground, all the men were shot and all but a handful of the children were sent to Poland where they were gassed. 143 of the women of the village survived in the Ravensbruck concentration camp and when they came home they found nothing but an open field where the village

Czechoslovak participation in the first weeks of "Operation Overlord"—the invasion of Normandy that began on June 6, 1944—was almost exclusively limited to the air, as soldiers from occupied Czechoslovakia's 1st Armoured Brigade only deployed to France weeks after the Allied landing. But hundreds more Czech fighting men took part in the D-Day landings doing battle under the flags of other Allied nations.

Even though there were many Czechs who suffered appallingly during the Second World War - whether it was in concentration camps or as forced labour - most of them have only recently began to receive any kind of compensation. Due to the tense relations between West Germany and the countries of the Eastern Bloc, for decades there was little hope of reaching agreement. It was not until 2001 that the German government begun compensating victims from the Czech Republic. This process is now complete, and the results were presented at a press conference

In today's One on One Jan Velinger's guest is Susanne Medas, a British citizen of German-Czech-Jewish descent who is a sprightly 81, but still regularly visits the Czech Republic to teach English. She has been coming back since the early 90s even if returning means a certain coming to terms with the past. In her youth Susanne was lucky to escape following the Nazi occupation, one of the children saved through Nicholas Winton's famous kindertransports. But, although she escaped, she never saw her parents again. In this One on One she tells the story

Dr Milena Hubschmannova is the Czech Republic's foremost scholar of Romani, the ancient language spoken by millions of Roma across Europe. At the time of the German occupation she was a little girl, living with her family in Prague's New Town, close to Wenceslas Square. Here she recalls two memories from that time. They seem unconnected, but both show how in war the smallest chance can mean the difference between life and death.

Following the Munich Agreement of 1938, which allowed Hitler to occupy Czechoslovakia's border regions, the Czechoslovak government fled to London, where they were to remain until after the War. Many of Edvard Benes's cabinet-in-exile had children, and not wanting them to lose their Czech, his government set up a Czechoslovak state school in the UK. Few people know about the school today, but that's something which should change with a new exhibition of its archives. Senator Edvard Outrata was a student at the school:

Singled out for extermination by the Nazis along racial lines, only five out of every hundred Czech Roma are thought to have survived the Second World War. The majority were interned in the Czech-run camps of Lety and Hodinin, where hundreds of Roma—mostly children—died from disease, hunger and abuse at the hands of Czech guards, and from where thousands more were sent on to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. As Brian Kenety reports, the European Parliament's recent call for the Czech state to tear down a pig farm built atop the Lety camp lent

On Wednesday morning the Czech President Vaclav Klaus was among a small group of people who gathered at the Russian Orthodox memorial chapel in Prague's Olsany Cemetery. They were there to remember a tragic and long forgotten episode that began just days after the liberation of Prague sixty years ago in May 1945. David Vaughan reports.

My grandmother Marie Velingerova, the daughter of a Czech industrialist, was 27 years-old when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in March of 1939: like most Czechs, she was filled with dread. Married, a mother of two, she worked as a clerk at her family's store, and for some time life went on as normal. Then came the assassination of the Nazi "reichsprotektor" Reinhard Heydrich by Czech patriots. Here she recalls the mood that day and some personal events that followed.