On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of Hitler’s closest friends, was assassinated in Prague. In retribution, Hitler ordered the small Czech mining village of Lidice to be liquidated on the false charge that it had aided the assassins. On June 10, 1942, the Nazis entered Lidice and rounded up the population. All 172 men and boys over age 16 in the village were immediately executed, while the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died before the end of the war. 8 children were selected for re-education in German families, and the rest (over 100) were gassed to death at Chelmno Concentration Camp.
Having rid the village of its inhabitants, the Nazis then destroyed the village itself, first setting all buildings on fire and then razing them to the ground with explosives. Finally, they exhumed the town cemetery and liquidated even THOSE inhabitants of Lidice. By the time they left, what had been a full-fledged village only days before was now no more than an empty field.
Today, the site houses a memorial, museum, monuments, the common grave of the Lidice men, and a "Park of Peace and Friendship" where thousands of rose-bushes from various parts of the world are planted. I visited the site alone, catching the public bus towards Kladno from the Dejvicka stop. Half an hour later, I was stepping out of the bus in the middle of nowhere. The bus stop sign read “Lidice” but it could just as easily have read “Uninhabited Czech Countryside.” I chose a direction to walk, and thank goodness the gods were on my side that day, because within minutes I could see what looked like a memorial off on the horizon. It was the Lidice memorial – much smaller than I had anticipated, but the memorial all the same.
The air was deathly still – as far as the eye could see, nothing moved. I saw no car, no other human, no signs of life besides an inappropriately bright and cheery “Coca-Cola” sign in front of the memorial, pointing toward some vending machines. I veered left and entered the museum, finding a long woman behind the counter reading a book. (I wonder how long it had been since she’d seen another human – perhaps she is like the Knight Templar in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” doomed to a life of eternal solitude broken on the rare occasion that a random person enters her lair. But I digress.) She shook off her dust and welcomed me, ushering me into a room for a private screening of a documentary on Lidice that told the story of the town and showed footage of the town’s demolition (filmed in disgustingly precise detail by the Nazis).
From there, I went into the museum and saw a slew of artifacts – the door from the church (all that survived after it was burned to the ground), letters from the children written during the first days of their imprisonment begging distant families members for food and warm clothing, and perhaps most disturbingly, a picture of all the schoolchildren, taken just days before the Nazis entered the town to exact revenge. The museum had video after video of interviews – with the few Ravensbrück survivors, with the children chosen to be “re-educated” in Germany, and with the historians who brought the tragic history of Lidice to light. It was a chilling yet terrifically well-done museum.
I exited the building and entered the grounds of the memorial, following a winding footpath that led from the town’s lone remains (the foundation of the church and a wall of the school building) to the mass grave for the men murdered that fateful day in 1942, and then from a statue honoring the innocent Lidice children who fell victim to this terror to a memorial rose garden. All in all, it was a touching, heartbreaking, yet enthralling taste of history. I can’t do justice to the experience in words, but perhaps these pictures can help:
Memorial to the Lidice children.
The empty field where Lidice used to stand (the structure at the top of the hill is the memorial).
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