He noted that many such personal links existed from the more than four decades that the Soviet Union controlled Czechoslovakia.

Zuzana Ruzickova endured three concentration camps in World War Two, including Auschwitz, and was persecuted by the Communists in Czechoslovakia in the years that followed.

Eight months after Dubček’s election, his reforms ended abruptly as the U.S.S.R. sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia and occupied the country.