Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.

Today from Brazil in the 1980s the fear generated by one of the world's worst ever civil nuclear accidents.

When the cars arrived at the cemetery people started throwing stones and bricks at them.

They tried to stop the burial of a six-year-old girl.

Also, the Battle of Algiers recreated on film in the 1960s by the very liberation fighters who'd fought against French colonialists.

I wanted future generations to see what it had been like,

and maybe then they wouldn't have to take up arms like we had to.

Plus, we'll step aboard the last regular steam train to run in Britain

and meet a Cuban spy sent to Florida to go underground for the Castro regime.

As I walk into a room, the first guy that is introduced to me is the assassin of Chequebara.

For me it was like a test.

That's coming up later, but we begin with one of the most famous episodes of the Second World War, an event that was

handed down to future generations in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far.

This was Operation Market Garden, at the time one of the largest airborne

offensives of World War II when the Allies parachuted thousands of troops

into the occupied Netherlands in September 1944. It was a bold attempt to bring about the final defeat of Nazi

Germany. Bold, certainly, but perhaps also overambitious. Mike Lanchen has been to the Netherlands to speak to a Dutch woman now in her 90s who watched

the paratroopers dropping from the sky, desperately hoping that they would bring a swift end to the war.

On the morning of September 17th, 1944, 23-year-old Hetti Bischoff Van Hemskirk rushed to the roof of her house in Arnum in eastern Holland with her mother and sister alerted by the sounds in the skies above.

The air was full of parachutes and it looked like, yeah, what can I say,

falling stars or something.

Oh, black things in the air and many planes.

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