The sad story of the children of Lidice, who still touch all who gaze upon their faces ...
Unfortunately, history is too often written with the blood of the innocent, without there ever being enough alibis, explanations, and justifications.
The two global conflicts in only 8 effective years of fighting marked the entire twentieth-century that brought ruin and destruction to the lives of millions of people.
This is the story of the children of Lidice, an episode that despite not having a happy ending must serve to teach everyone the value of life.
via Lidice Massacre
The story takes place during the Second World War in the small town of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia not yet having become the Czech Republic. On 27 May 1942, a group of partisans assaulted the convoy on which was traveling General Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful members of the Nazi hierarchy. The high-ranking German officer died a few days later because of the injuries sustained in the attack.
As a retaliatory action, on 10 June 1942, the village of Lidice, already under German control, was burnt to the ground, and its inhabitants murdered or deported.
In all, 173 men, from 16 years old and up were killed, while the 184 women were sent to the concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.
Consequently, in Lidice, that left 99 children between the ages of 1 and 16 years old, who were sent to work in the textile factory in Lodz.
Subsequently, it was decided that 17 of the children would be entrusted to German families to be "Germanized". The 82 remaining children were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp. Fortunately, 153 out of the 184 mothers sent to the concentration camps survived, but only those of the 17 children adopted by German families succeeded in ever seeing their children alive again.
In the meantime, Lidice as a town had been canceled from all maps and it was not until in 1949, that it was decided to start its reconstruction near the ruins of the old village.
In memory of the 82 children victims of the Nazi extermination camps, the Czech artist Marie Uchytilová carved a group of votive statues in a sculptured work that lasted over 20 years. Unfortunately, the woman passed away before completing all the statues but other local sculptors were able to finish it.
Today, if you visit the town of Lidice, you can tour the Lidice Museum and the Lidice Memorial also called The Children's War Victims Monument with the life-size statues of the 82 children. The faces of those figures have an extraordinary expressiveness, with a gaze that seems to implore us to never again repeat this absurd act of barbarism.
