#ASkMKeAboutLidice
I’m departing from my usual posts about the USS Franklin and World War II in the Pacific Theater to repost this. I hope you will read it.
The following post is from the Facebook page, “Historia Obscurum.”
In the summer and fall of 1942, a strange phenomenon began springing up in distant corners of the world, in which streets, towns, even children, were being given the same name.
It all began with the killing of a monster.
At the end of December in 1941, two Czech soldiers living in exile in England parachuted back into Czechoslovakia on a mission to assassinate the ruthless and brutal German SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, who was then working as the Reich-Protector over much of that occupied country.
During his reign of terror, Heydrich – one of the main architects of the Final Solution, and nicknamed “The Butcher of Prague” – kept the “peace” through racial suppression, forced labor, executions, and sending “undesirables” off to death camps.
In May of 1942, a team led by the two parachutists, named Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, planned and carried out an ambush against Heydrich as he drove in his open-topped car through Prague.
Wounded by an explosive hurled at the car, Heydrich died a week later.
In the aftermath of the attack, Kubiš and Gabčík, along with most of their co-conspirators, were killed.
When he learned of Heydrich’s death, Adolf Hitler flew into a rage and ordered massive reprisals against the Czech people.
Because of spurious intelligence reports, the full force of Hitler’s anger fell chiefly upon two small villages: Lidice (pronounced “Li-dí-tsay”) and Ležáky (pronounced “Le-zyah-ke”).
Two days after Heydrich’s funeral, German SS and SD troops descended upon the two towns.
In Ležáky, no adult was left alive, the children were seized, and the houses and buildings were burned to the ground.
In Lidice, the population was dragged from their homes, and every male over the age of fourteen was shot and killed – at first five at a time, but when this was found to be taking too long, they killed them in groups of ten.
The women were deported to concentration camps for forced labor or extermination.
Those few children who met specified “racial purity” criteria were sent to Germany for indoctrination and adoption by the families of members of the SS.
Most of the rest of the children were killed in the backs of special enclosed trucks by carbon monoxide, the precursors to the gas chambers later installed at places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Then Lidice suffered an additional horror. Believed (erroneously) to be the town where some of the conspirators had been hiding before the assassination, the town was burned, and stone structures were dynamited.
Slave labor was brought in to dismantle the ruins brick by brick and haul everything away, so that, as Hitler ordered, every trace of the town was wiped from the face of the earth so that the memory of Lidice would die.
But it didn’t.
The Nazis allowed reports of the massacre to be released as a warning to other occupied countries, but as the news began spreading around the world, it had quite the opposite effect….
In Mexico, the village of San Jerónimo Aculo changed its name to San Jerónimo Lídice….
In Coventry, England, a shopping market was renamed Lidice Place….
In the American state of Illinois, a new town being laid out was named Lidice….
Also in Illinois, the American lawyer and politician Wendell Wilkie eulogized the destruction of the town to a silent, stunned audience, using the news reports from the Nazis themselves to condemn their barbarity….
In the United Kingdom, the Lidice Shall Live! drive – run mostly by British miners – raised money to help rebuild the town following the war….
In places all over the free world the name Lidice began appearing, and hundreds of children born that year were named Lidice by their parents, and the name continues to be given even to this day.
What the Nazis hoped would be a warning to their enemies turned into a rallying cry, and helped show a world still mostly ignorant of Nazi brutality why the fight against the Third Reich was so necessary.
When the war ended, a handful of women and children who survived the concentration camps returned to the site where Lidice had been, and, with international help, began rebuilding the town on a site nearby.
Today there is a memorial near the town dedicated to the children who suffered and were lost during the Nazi occupation. There also is a larger memorial to the annihilation of the town and the murder of its people. And there’s even another memorial placed in gratitude to the British miners who helped the town rebuild.
In 1942, with so many major events grabbing headlines, that the world took notice of the destruction of one tiny town that nobody had ever heard of was a miracle. Yet after the war, what happened in Lidice largely dissolved from the world’s memory as Czechoslovakia fell behind the Iron Curtain.
But now that’s changing.
As part of the Unearthed Project, people all over the world are being asked to spread the memory of what happened to Lidice in 1942, and of the kindness and generosity through which the town was rebuilt, by promising to tell at least two people the story….
When I first heard about this project and what they were asking, I knew I could do better than just telling two people – this page reaches around 7 million people each month, so by writing this post I am fulfilling my promise to share, and then some. It’s my honor to be able to do so.
Now I’m asking you to make and fulfill that same promise, as well, to tell at least two people this story, so we can honor the memory of the victims of Lidice and Ležáky: the men and teens who were shot, the children who were gassed, the women who perished in death camps, and the caring hearts of all those around the world who vowed never to let them be forgotten.
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All told, around 1,300 people were killed by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
His grave in Berlin has been unmarked since the Soviet occupation.
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My thanks to Historia Obscurum.
