Water drips down from the narrow mineshaft’s rocky, damp ceiling, droplets echoing as they hit the rusty rail tracks used decades ago to haul stone – some of it laden with uranium ore – out of the tree-covered hillside and into waiting Soviet train carriages.

“I remember that whether it was cold or hot outside, it was always the same temperature in there, always hot,” Zdenek Mandrholec says, using a cane to steady himself as he stands outside the mine’s entrance in the Czech Republic town of Jachymov on the Czech-German border.

“They [the Soviets] could do anything they wanted to us.”