At one point, Prague had proportionately the third-highest Jewish population in the world. Many of the most prominent cultural and commercial figures in what is now the Czech Republic were Jews; many of them or their relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

Kafka, who was born and raised in the city’s historic Jewish ghetto shortly before it was dismantled in the 1890s, died before the war. However, his three sisters (Gabriele, Valerie and Ottilie) were all murdered in the gas chambers.

Sigmund Freud, born in the Czech province of Moravia to a long line of rabbis, moved to Vienna to study medicine, and then escaped to London in 1938. But four of Freud’s five sisters died in the camps: Mitzi, aged 81, and Paula, 78, were transported to Theresienstadt (Terezin, in Czech), north of Prague, and taken from there to the Maly Trostinets extermination camp near Minsk. Dolfi, 80, died in Terezin of internal bleeding due to advanced starvation, and Rosa, 82, was killed in Treblinka.

The composer Gustav Mahler, born to a Jewish family in Bohemia, died before the war. But his niece Alma Rose, described as one of Europe’s most accomplished and least-known musicians, was forced to lead the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz, before being killed. She was deported there as a Jew, despite having converted to Catholicism.

Yet not many Czechs know this, or are aware of the fate of tens of thousands of other Czech Jews murdered in the Holocaust — often with the collaboration of Czechs. There is no official memorial anywhere in Prague: not even a plaque, let alone a museum or learning centre of the kind that most European capitals now have, together with cities in Argentina, the US, Australia, Brazil, China, Mexico, South Africa and elsewhere.

There is a memorial wall in Prague’s Pinkas synagogue but this is not a public plaque, but a private initiative by the Jewish community, for which you have to pay an entry fee. There is also a statue in a railway station of Nicholas Winton, the Briton who helped rescue 669 Czech children in the Kindertransport. But this is no substitute for a proper memorial in the centre of Prague of the kind that is found in Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere. The only public memory of Holocaust victims in Prague are the stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”), cobble-sized, brass-plated stones which are embedded as part of the pavement outside the homes where victims lived. The stones are paid for by families or friends of the victims, and can cost up to 250 euros each, including local fees.

This project was started by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1996 in Kreuzberg, Berlin, and has now spread throughout Europe. Every stone has the same format, giving the victim’s name, and years of birth, deportation and death. Each stolperstein is made by hand in Berlin by one man, Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer. He makes up to 450 every month. Today there are more than 70,000 stolpersteine installed in 2,000 towns and cities in 24 countries across Europe. Sweden and Denmark will be added later this year, bringing the total to 26 countries. It is the largest decentralised memorial in the world.

The stolpersteine are placed alone, or in couples and whole families. In one case, outside a former Jewish orphanage in Hamburg, 34 stones are placed together, paid for by a well-wisher to remember the children deported from there.

In Prague, there are 311 stolpersteine dotted around the city and 41 others will be added later this year. Only a small proportion of the city’s Jewish population have these memorials: according to the 1930 census, there were 117,551 Jews in what is now the Czech Republic. Some escaped, but the great majority were killed. Since there are no remains for the victims who were gassed and burned, the stolpersteine have become, in effect, a substitute for a grave or tombstone. Yet they are left in a grimy, sometimes filthy, condition by the city authorities, a fact I have often lamented when walking past them. This is the result, it seems, not of anti-Semitism — the Czechs are among the least anti-Semitic people in Europe — but of apathy.

So I was heartened to learn that Trevor Sage, a retired British man living in Prague, was so alarmed by their poor condition and the fact that some had gone missing that he decided to clean and look after them, one stolperstein at a time. Sage, 59, is not Jewish and has no personal or family connection to the Holocaust. But in recent months the stolpersteine have become his passion. Indeed, he tells me, he feels it his “duty to maintain their condition and preserve their memory” as many of the relatives who helped place them there are elderly and living abroad in America, Britain or Israel.

He makes sure each is kept particularly clean on the victim’s birthday, and this Yom HaShoah (the Jewish Holocaust memorial day, which this year falls on May 1-2), he has for the first time recruited a team of volunteers, mainly drawn from Prague’s foreign population, to clean all 311 stones. He says he was inspired by another man in Salzburg who is doing the same thing.

Trevor has set up a Facebook page, Stolpersteine Prague, where there are details and locations of each stolperstein in the city and photographs for 195 of the victims he managed to find with assistance from their families.

The youngest is for Jiřina Pfefferova, who was just eight months old when she was deported to Terezin on July 23, 1942, and two years, 11 months old when she was taken to Auschwitz and gassed on October 6, 1944. Her sister Alena, who was killed with her, was seven. My own grandmother’s parents, though not from Prague, were also deported to Terezin the same week as baby Jiřina — it was my great-grandfather’s 75th birthday — and later they were murdered in Treblinka. The oldest person remembered with a stone is Berta Krumpelesova, who was 83 when she was murdered in Terezin.

Among other stolpersteine I went to see were those for Petr Ginz, a very talented young boy — between the ages of eight and 14 he wrote five novels and drew pictures to illustrate them — who was deported to Terezin and later killed in Auschwitz.

His diary, written when he was 13 and 14, published in English as The Diary of Petr Ginz 1941-1942, has been compared to that of Anne Frank. Petr dreamt of going to the moon, and a copy of his picture Earth seen from the Moon was (with the permission of Yad Vashem) taken by Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, whose mother and grandmother were Auschwitz survivors, onto the American space shuttle Columbia. The shuttle tragically broke apart while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere on February 1, 2003, destroying the copy of Petr’s drawing.

Among other notable stolpersteine are those for Milena Jesenska (Kafka’s lover), and Gideon Klein, the young Czech composer. Klein was deported to Terezin in December 1941 along with two other gifted Jewish musicians, Pavel Haas (who was Janáček’s pupil) and Viktor Ullmann (Schoenberg’s pupil). In 1944, Klein was further deported to Auschwitz, where he was worked to death as a slave labourer, dying in January 1945. Milena Jesenska, though not Jewish herself, refused to leave her circle of Jewish writers and editors and was deported with some of them to Ravensbrück, where she died on May 17, 1944.

Perhaps the most remarkable stolperstein in Prague is for Anna Jaretzki. Anna was the non-Jewish great-granddaughter of a Prussian prince, Prince August, whose portrait hangs in the Wallace Collection in London. The Prince had a relationship with a 15-year-old called Emilie, which was disapproved of by the royal family. As a result and to avoid any possible claims on the royal family’s wealth — the prince was one of the richest men in Europe — their daughter Charlotte (born in 1838) was registered under the family name of the prince’s Jewish tailor, Isadore Gottschalk. Although Charlotte was not Jewish, the Nazis presumed her granddaughter Anna was. So, 104 years after the “incorrect” registration, she was deported as a “part-Jew” to Terezin in July 1942, and died there from typhus in August 1942. Some of Anna’s blood relatives were senior Nazis who participated in the genocide of European Jews. Such was the utter madness that was the Holocaust. 

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I take the opposite view — that collectively the world has not studied it nearly enough, and has not properly learned its lessons. If it had, anti-Semitism wouldn’t once again be rife in so many countries, including European ones. And if it had, I don’t think President Assad of Syria could have used chemical weapons to kill 1,429 civilians, including hundreds of children, in a suburb of his own capital last August, without punitive action being taken by the world in response.

But of course Assad’s actions can’t compare in scale and systematic dehumanisation with the genocide carried out by the Nazis and their helpers from every country in Europe (including British subjects in Guernsey and Jersey).

For decades the subject was all but ignored by the film and publishing industries — Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi were among those who struggled to find publishers. Eventually, books were published, films were made, and — decades late — Holocaust museums opened and memorials erected. And because there are still so many amazing stories to be told there are still more remarkable films being made. In Darkness, released in 2012, about the only group of Jews to survive the war alive in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Europe, was to my mind even more impressive than Schindler’s List or The Pianist.

Next year’s Cannes Film Festival will see the release of The Zookeeper’s Wife, the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who saved 300 Jewish adults and children from the Nazis by hiding them in animal cages at Warsaw Zoo.

And there is so much more we don’t know. How many, for example, know of Chelmno, the first extermination camp set up on European soil, in 1941, which served as a model for later camps? The Nazis killed at least 200,000 Jews there, as they experimented with the most efficient ways to kill en masse. Only three Jews survived Chelmno. Few of the murderers were ever punished.

How many know of Belzec, where Ukrainian SS units, under the command of Germans, murdered 500,000 Jews and only two survived? The lack of survivors is a prime reason why this camp is so little-known, despite the enormous number of victims. But we know exactly what went on there because the Nazis — proud of how many people they were exterminating — kept meticulous records.

How many realise that when Europeans wanted to save their fellow citizens, they often could have done so? For example, in Lithuania, where 95 per cent of the country’s Jews were killed — often by Lithuanians working with the Nazis — Jan Zwartendijk, the Dutch representative for Philips’ plants in Lithuania, saved more than 1,200 Jews. He refused to leave when he was recalled, and instead (having persuaded the Dutch government-in-exile to appoint him consul in Kaunas) frantically began issuing exit permits to Jews for the Dutch West Indies. An orphanage and school in Israel are named after Zwartendijk, but right up to his death in 1976 few were interested in him in his native Holland, and Lithuania only begrudgingly acknowledged his deeds in September 2012.

Or who knows that, while French police were helping the Nazis round up Jews in the rest of France, in the Huguenot village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon the entire population (under the guidance of the local priest) shielded hundreds of Jews from surrounding villages, hiding them in their homes? President Jacques Chirac only officially recognised the heroism of the town in 2004, and it was not until last summer that a museum commemorating its wartime courage finally opened.

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Which is one reason why one of the more remarkable stories coming out of the Middle East over the last two and a half years has been largely overlooked: the bravery of Israeli doctors and civilians who have gone into war-ravaged neighbouring Syria to treat the injured, and feed and clothe refugees from all ethnic backgrounds.

Thousands of Syrian doctors have fled the country and hundreds have been killed as the Assad regime continues to bomb medical clinics as a means of terrorising population groups who oppose his government. Where they can, Israeli medics have gone in to help those few Syrian doctors still working. Other Israelis have defied the Jordanian authorities by helping Syrian refugees in that country. 

Although they work independently of the Israeli government, the Israeli army has quietly supported their humanitarian actions, sometimes helping ferry them across the border. In addition to setting up field hospitals, they have brought food. The Economist pointed out in September that in Dera alone, the southern city where the anti-Assad uprising began, Israelis have distributed 300,000 meals to Syrians, as well as medication, mobile phones and chemical protection suits.

The more severely injured Syrians — particularly children — have been brought to Israel for specialised treatment, all at the expense of the Israeli government and Jewish charities. Syrians are taking a risk even entering Israel: the Syrian government makes it a crime for its citizens to go there.

One or two American news outlets have reported on the medical treatment in Israel (though not on the help being given in Syria and Jordan). In July, Jim Clancy of CNN went to the Rebecca Sieff Hospital in Safed (named after a member of the founding family of Marks & Spencer), where he noted that half of all intensive care beds were occupied by Syrian civilians wounded during the previous week alone.

In May, the New York Times reported from Nahariya Hospital in northern Israel on a three-year-old girl being given skin grafts for horrific facial injuries she sustained during a government missile attack in Syria. In the next bed, the newspaper noted, a girl, aged 12, lay in a deep sleep, having been operated on for a severe stomach wound and a hole in her back. Next to her lay another Syrian girl, 13, recovering from over a month of operations for injuries to her face, arm and leg. In Wolfson Medical Center near Tel Aviv, the life of a four-year-old Syrian girl was saved by open-heart surgery. In another hospital, a Syrian mother gave birth last month, the first Syrian born in Israel.

Although there has been hardly any coverage in British media, one Palestinian website noted: “While the Arab countries make empty promises, the Israelis have crossed the border to provide assistance to the refugees, risking their lives without a word of thank you.”

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