An aid worker who helped refugees flee the Nazis is to be honoured by Prague in a move historians hope will rescue her name and heroic deeds from obscurity.

Marie Schmolka will be awarded honorary citizenship of her native city by the local municipality in recognition of what experts describe as a central role in saving large numbers of Jews and opponents of Hitler before the second world war.

Campaigners hope Monday’s ceremony in Prague’s Archa theatre will pave the way to greater recognition in Britain, where Schmolka died of a heart attack in March 1940, aged 46.

A Jew and a Zionist, Schmolka extended aid to refugees – including communists – fleeing into Czechoslovakia from Germany after the Nazis took power in 1933. Later, as the Czechoslovak representative of the League of Nations commission for refugees, she helped relocate them, including to Palestine and the Dominican Republic, as Hitler’s territorial ambitions began to threaten neighbouring countries.

Czech historians say her work deserves similar acclaim to that given to Sir Nicholas Winton, the British volunteer credited with helping about 700 mainly Jewish children escape Czechoslovakia in 1939 after it was invaded by Nazi Germany, in a rescue effort established under the umbrella of Schmolka’s broader mission to tackle a refugee problem that had become overwhelming.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vít Masare, the co-chair of the Green party in Prague, outside Schmolka’s former home. Photograph: Robert Tait/The Guardian

While Winton is memorialised in a statue at Prague railway station and was awarded the Czech Republic’s highest state honour, there is no shrine to Schmolka, who was arrested by the Gestapo on 16 March 1939, a day after the Nazi takeover, and imprisoned for months.

“She is one of many women erased by history,” said Anna Hájková, an associate professor of modern European history at the University of Warwick and co-head of the Marie Schmolka Society, dedicated to promoting her achievements.

“Schmolka was a global player in saving refugees from Nazi Germany. She attended the 1938 Évian conference [which discussed Jewish refugees] and went to Poland to help Jews who had been expelled from Germany and were stuck in no-man’s land. I don’t want to dismiss the work of younger guys like Winton, but we have to see it in perspective – she was much more important.”

The society plans to lobby the Association of Jewish Refugees for a blue plaque to be placed outside the house in Gospel Oak in north London where she was living at the time of her death. “We want to spread the notion in Britain that this is not just [about] Nicholas Winton,” said Hájková.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The former Jewish primary school in Prague where Schmolka rented rooms and worked from before the second world war. Photograph: Robert Tait

Schmolka, who went to Britain following the outbreak of war after having been sent to France by the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann to demand quicker emigration of Jews, was cremated at Golders Green crematorium in a funeral at which she was eulogised by Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak foreign minister-in-exile.

She does not have a grave, her ashes having been taken by the funeral director, according to records. A memorial hydrangea with a plaque in the crematorium’s remembrance gardens disappeared decades ago after funding for its upkeep stopped.

Until now, Schmolka has been similarly unheralded in Prague. There is no memorial or visible reference to her in the five-storey former primary school building in the historic Jewish quarter of Josefov, from which she ran the refugee relief operation and where she was arrested.

Her former home in the city’s tourist district stands derelict and in disrepair, although councillors recently stopped it from being sold to developers to form part of a hotel currently under construction, and have intensified efforts to make the local council buy the property, which it already part owns.

Vít Masare, co-chair of the Prague Greens, who organised the move to award Schmolka honorary citizenship, has called for the creation of a permanent exhibition marking her life below the first-floor house. “There’s a big justification for dedicating more space than just a plaque,” he said. “I worked with my Green party colleagues to help the refugees after the 2015 crisis and we got so much criticism. I can imagine the hostile conditions she had to work in, with so much antisemitism.”