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At daybreak
on June 10, all the inhabitants of Lidice, a village in
Czechoslovakia, were taken from their homes. All 192 men and 71
women residents of the village were murdered. Another 190 women were
deported to the women’s camp at Ravensbrueck; 143 of them returned
at the end of the war. Ninety-eight children were abducted and
turned over to "education institutions"; only 15 of them
survived.
Then, in
the presence of photographers, Hans Frank and Ernst
Kaltenbrunner-Heydrich’s successor-Lidice was razed to the ground.
The Germans explained the premeditated massacre by arguing, falsely,
that the villagers had aided Heydrich’s assassins.
Lidice was
rebuilt after the war and became a symbol of the Nazi reign of
terror and the valor of the Czech resistance. |
