Roxanne de Bastion is honouring the memory of her brilliant Hungarian ancestor to keep his legacy alive

My family has a piano. Its keys are weathered from touch. It has tiny marks on the top right corner where my dad used to gnaw at the wood with his baby teeth.

I always knew this instrument to be special. It felt out of place in our otherwise modest family home (none of my friends had a battle-scarred baby grand in their living rooms, that’s for sure).

Thousands of Germans were held in camps in Britain after the war – and local women who ‘fraternised’ with them scandalised the nation. Could one of these illicit relationships explain the puzzle at the heart of my family tree?

In the summer of 1947, it would have taken Gwen Chandler just 15 minutes to cycle home from the textile factory in Bletchley where she worked as a machinist. Her route went east out of town, straight past the county cinema and up the hill into the Buckinghamshire village of Little Brickhill, where she lived at 9 Watling Street with her mum, Lottie, her aunt, uncle and grandparents.

It’s easy to imagine Gwen pausing in the heart of the village and glancing apprehensively to her right down the tree-lined drive to the large manor house there. Requisitioned during the second world war, it was home to 105 German prisoners. Held captive since Hitler’s defeat, these men – along with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots scattered across Britain in dozens of prison camps – were put to work in the fields, brick factories, construction sites and gasworks.

RAF says Battle of Britain flight will not take place because of safety concerns arising from death of pilot Sqn Ldr Mark Long

No second world war aircraft will participate in tribute flypasts marking the 80th anniversary of D-day next week after the crash of a Spitfire in Lincolnshire last weekend that killed its pilot.

The RAF said the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight (BBMF) would continue to be grounded in its entirety because specialist crash investigators had not yet been unable to establish the cause of the accident that killed Sqn Ldr Mark Long.

On the eve of D-day, the wartime British PM drafted a letter that could have ended De Gaulle’s political career

It is a letter that might have changed the course of European history- had it been sent.

In early June 1944, a vast armada was gathering on the south coast of England with the task of liberating France and, despite concerns about leaks from the French camp, the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, had invited Gen Charles de Gaulle to fly to London on his personal plane from Algiers.

Reuniting the stars of Black Narcissus, this movie about a back-room boffin attached to a bomb disposal unit finds the film-makers pushing gloriously against genre conventions

Kathleen Byron and David Farrar were unforgettable presences in the 1947 Powell and Pressburger classic Black Narcissus, playing a hysterical nun and the taciturn colonial agent with whom she is peevishly infatuated. The film-makers reunited these remarkable performers two years later for this intimate, intense wartime drama thriller; brilliant on the emotional misery, low-level dread and petty office politics of wartime government. It takes place mostly in London’s noirish darkness and rain, except for the sensational final sequence in the bright sunlight of Chesil beach in Dorset.

Adapted from an autobiographical novel by military scientist Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room is a work that shows the film-makers pushing – brilliantly – at the conventions and constraints of a regular wartime period drama. Any number of British directors might have wanted to take on this story. But the Powell and Pressburger authorial flourishes are irresistible.

Cryptanalyst played by Keira Knightley on screen, and who was briefly engaged to Alan Turing, commemorated in London

Joan Clarke, the second world war codebreaker who was played by Keira Knightley in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, has been honoured with a commemorative blue plaque ahead of the 80th anniversary of D-day.

The plaque was unveiled on Wednesday at Clarke’s childhood home in south London, English Heritage said.

Manfred Goldberg, 94, urges authorities to preserve fragments of thousands of shoes left to rot at Stutthof concentration camp site

One of the last remaining survivors of the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp has appealed to authorities to salvage fragments of tens of thousands of shoes belonging to murdered Holocaust victims that were recently discovered in a forest at the site.

Manfred Goldberg, who was imprisoned as a teenager at Stutthof, 24 miles (38km) east of Gdańsk, said he was “shocked and dismayed” to hear of the existence of the remnants, eight decades after the shoes’ owners were forced to remove them before being gassed and cremated.

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2021: During the second world war, Chinese merchant seamen helped keep Britain fed, fuelled and safe – and many gave their lives doing so. But from late 1945, hundreds of them who had settled in Liverpool suddenly disappeared. Now their children are piecing together the truth. By Dan Hancox

Maxwell Smart lost his family in the Holocaust, but was saved by his mother’s instruction to run. It was seven decades before he told anyone what had happened

Maxwell Smart still feels at his safest when it rains. The 93-year-old first learned this as a boy of 10, alone in a forest, lying on a bed of leaves in a makeshift bunker, waiting out the Nazi occupation of Poland. For two years he hid in the forest, evading hunters. Detection meant likely death.

“It was a sport to kill a Jew,” he says. “[Your typical Nazi] is not going to go in the mud and get dirty and filthy; he is doing it for happiness, for enjoyment. So when it was raining, I knew I was safe.”

Announcement raises questions about aircraft’s participation in national D-day event in Portsmouth

The RAF has grounded a fleet of Spitfire planes after the death of a pilot over the weekend, raising the prospect of the legendary aircraft being absent from the 80th anniversary of the D-day landings next month.

Sqn Ldr Mark Long – a Typhoon pilot based at RAF Coningsby – was killed in a crash while flying a Spitfire belonging to the Battle of Britain Memorial Fleet as part of a memorial event.

A fresh take on Operation Bagration, the colossal eastern front offensive in the second world war, is the author and broadcaster’s best book yet – and shows how next to the Soviets, the Germans’ worst enemy was Hitler

As a historian, Jonathan Dimbleby has written several good books about the second world war. But this is the most interesting. It is not about “turning points”, those diamonds of interpretation that authors love to dig up, sharpen and mount on an alluring book jackets. Instead, Endgame 1944 is about what happened after a turning point, about the gigantic consequences as the inevitable slouched out of the future into the present.

At the core of Dimbleby’s book is Operation Bagration, on the war’s eastern front. It was named after the famous Russian general who died of wounds in 1812, resisting the French invaders at the Battle of Borodino. In 1944, Bagration was the name given to “the mightiest onslaught of the second world war”, the offensive by five “fronts”, four Soviet armies and one Polish, numbering well over a million men who set off across a line stretching almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It began in June, timed to take advantage of the Normandy landings in the first week of that month, and by August the Red army had halted on the outskirts of Warsaw. The advance, in some places by as much as 600km, had driven the Nazi armies out of much of the Baltic lands, Belarus, all of eastern Poland, western Ukraine and the border regions of Romania and Hungary. It was no walkover. The Soviet armies suffered horrifying casualties. But in “the five months since the start of Operations Overlord [Normandy] and Bagration, a total of 1,460,000 [German] men had been killed, wounded or captured, 900,000 of these on the eastern front”. That and the devastating losses of German armour and equipment were unsustainable.

Nearly 80 years since the Allied invasion, the testimony of Charles Shay, a 99-year-old former US army medic, reminds us of the significance of that day

Next month will see the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France, when about 156,000 troops crossed the Channel to fight their way on to five Normandy beaches.

No one who took part in that day, 6 June 1944, the largest seaborne assault in history, would ever forget the experience. Indeed, many were haunted by memories of it for the rest of their lives. Yet no matter how momentous an event might be – in this case it amounted to nothing less than the securing of western Europe’s liberty – a kind of societal amnesia inevitably deepens with each new generation.

Experts conclude hundreds more died on Channel Island, a British crown dependency, than previously thought

More than 1,000 slave labourers may have died on British soil at the hands of the Nazis in the second world war, hundreds more deaths than were officially recorded in historical archives, a review has found.

Labourers on the island of Alderney were “subject to atrocious living and working conditions, which included starvation, long working hours, completing dangerous construction works, beatings, maiming, torture, being housed in inadequate accommodation and, in some cases, executions”, the review said.

Defence secretary says RAF’s fleet stretched owing to conflicts in Ukraine and Middle East, but expects aircrafts will be found

The UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, has ordered an urgent review after it emerged there is a shortage of planes for a mass parachute drop to mark the 80th anniversary of D-day.

The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have left the RAF’s transport fleet stretched and defence officials are scrambling to find more aircraft for next month’s commemorations in Normandy.