Lidice, Kladno District, Central Bohemian Region, Czech Republic

🇨🇿 Lidice is a municipality and village in Kladno District in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. Lidice is built near the site of the previous village, which was completely destroyed on 10 June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and acting Reichsprotektor Kurt Daluege in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich.

Geography Lidice is located about 4 km (2 mi) east of Kladno and 12 km (7 mi) north-west of Prague. It lies in a flat agricultural landscape of the Prague Plateau.

History 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.

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. On 9 June 1942, 172 boys and men between age 14 to 84 were shot. 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. 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. The new village was built in 1947–1949.

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.

Culture 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.

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.

Legacy In remembrance of the Lidice massacre, many neighborhoods adopted the name Lidice in the years after the tragedy, and memorials were built. Notable examples include Lídice in Panama, San Jerónimo Lídice in Mexico, Lídice neighbourhood in La Pastora Parish of Caracas, Venezuela, Nova Lídice settlement in Medeiros Neto, Brazil, Lidice Memorial in Phillips, Wisconsin, Lidice Memorial Park in Crest Hill, Illinois, Plazuela Lidice town square in Montevideo, Uruguay, Lidic street in Santiago, Chile, and others.