When I first applied for the CWB Vienna- Prague 2023 teacher study tour, I wrote how I hoped we would be able to travel to Lidice, knowing that it was within driving distance of Prague and Terezín, places that were confirmed destinations for us. The massacre at Lidice on 9 and 10 June, 1942, was random in its occurrence but as horrific as any “planned” decisions made by the Nazi regime after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich on 27 May (he died 4 June).
Random should not imply a lack of intent on the part of the perpetrators, the randomness was that they could have picked any number of surrounding villages in suspicion of harboring or supporting the Czech paratroopers who carried out the attack. Lidice was chosen based upon false information and a misread letter sent to a sweetheart, intercepted by the manager of the factory where the intended recipient worked, and who was absent when the letter arrived.
What unfolded in the aftermath and the lust for reprisals avenging Heydrich, was the murder of 340 people, including 88 children gassed at Chełmno, north of Łódź, in occupied Poland–the Reichsgau Wartheland. 192 men and 60 women make up the remainder of the victims, shot on the 9th and 10th of June, including 26 killed on the 16th of June at a shooting range in Prague-Kobylisy. The majority of the women killed died at Ravensbrück or other camps, either from disease, malnourishment, or execution, and some on death marches. The town was looted, burned, and razed to the ground with the intention of wiping the name of Lidice off of any map, forever. The Nazis’ intention, was another in a long series of failures, however, and not only was there a collective outrage about the massacre all over the world, but many towns and municipalities changed their names to Lidice, children were named Lidice, and scores of musical and literary works were composed, including one by one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, “The Murder of Lidice”.
The memorial overlooks where the town used to be, near a rebuilt Lidice which was started in the aftermath of the war to provide homes for the surviving women and any returned children, as well as for any residents who survived the massacre at Ležáky (which happened on June 24 after Gestapo found a radio hidden there by another Czech partisan commander, Alfréd Bartoš). The Lidice Memorial grounds are beautiful but haunting, winds creating keening noises through the trees, lending to the solemnity and strangeness of the place. The gardens were in the full bloom of July, roses from all over the world heady in the air. The women of Lidice sent rose plants and cuttings to Ravensbrück where they adorn the ashes in burial mounds between the crematoria and the path toward the Siemens’ factory area. The small museum opens with a short film about the town and continues into a cool and dark curated space where pictures of the townspeople and the names of the massacred are interspersed with testimonies, visual and written, and artifacts from the ruins. It was an impactful experience, the presence of absence palpable, even more so than the grounds. It will stay with me for some time.
Ravensbrück roses, July 2023. Memorial to the Murdered Children of Lidice
by Marie Uchytilová-Kučová
Sign from the village doors to the Catholic church stumbling stone in front of first
house in Lidice-became Gestapo HQ
