Lidice is located about 4 kilometres (2 mi) east of Kladno and 12 km (7 mi) northwest of Prague. It lies in a flat agricultural landscape of the Prague Plateau.
The first written mention of Lidice is from 1318, in a chronicle written by Peter of Zittau. For centuries, Lidice was an agricultural village, which belonged to the Buštěhrad estate and shared its owners. After the industrialisation of the area in the second half of the 19th century, many of the inhabitants of Lidice worked in mines and steelworks in neighbouring Kladno and Slaný.[2][3]
Lidice was chosen as a target for reprisals in the wake of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, because its residents were suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans, and were falsely associated with aiding team members of Operation Anthropoid.[4][5] On 9 June 1942, 172 boys and men between age 14 to 84 were shot.[4] Altogether, about 340 people from Lidice were murdered in the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children). The village was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed with explosives. After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.[6] They were rehoused in a new village of Lidice that was built overlooking the original site, using money raised by the Lidice Shall Live campaign, initiated by Sir Barnett Stross and based in north Staffordshire in the United Kingdom.[7][8] The new village was built in 1947–1949.[3]
Evidence of the massacre, including Nazi propaganda videos, was shown at the Nuremberg Trials as a demonstration of the Nazi regime's violence. This included testimony from two of the surviving children, who were forcibly re-housed as part of the adoption process of Germanization.[9]
An art gallery, which displays permanent and temporary exhibitions, is in the new village 500 metres (1,600 ft) from the museum. The annual children's art competition attracts entries from around the world.[12]
In culture
In 1942, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay published "The Murder of Lidice," a dramatic poem commissioned by the Writers' War Board in the United States.
In 1943, the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů wrote the musical work, Memorial to Lidice [cs].
In 1943, The British author Gerald Kersh lightly fictionalized the massacre in the short novel "The Dead Look On."
In 2017, to mark the 75th anniversary of the tragedy, the English composer Vic Carnall wrote his Opus 17, In Memoriam: the Village of Lidice (Czechoslovakia / June, 1942), a work for solo piano.
In recent years numerous films have highlighted the events of the village's razing in 1942. The 1975 film Operation Daybreak, 2011 film Lidice and Anthropoid from 2015 all detail the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent massacre and razing of the village.
Czech Republic
