Lidice

This Past Thursday saw the premiere, In Prague, of the long-awaited film 'Lidice', the first Czech production to tell the story one of the darkest periods in Czech history, the destruction of The village of Lidice, located just a small distance from Prague, by the Nazis in 1942.

All of the men as well as boys aged 15 and up were killed and all women and most of the children were sent to concentration camps. In what for Czechs was one of the most horrific episodes of World War II, the Nazis murdered the inhabitants of Lidice and razed the small village to the ground in 1942, as part of reprisals for the assassination of the German governor of Bohemia and Moravia.

The men were immediately executed, while almost all of the women and children were later killed at Nazi death camps.

In all, 82 of the village’s 103 children died in the gas chambers, and it was in their honour that a group of life-sized bronze statues was erected at the Lidice Memorial in the 1990s.

The brutal act was part of extensive Nazi retribution for the assassination of acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The Nazi's then flattened the village so nothing remained of it.

The Movie of this atrocity has gotten mixed reviews in Prague, but still I can imagine it is quite moving. It has long been awaited in the Czech Republic and is finally out. I hope to be able to see it at some point with English Subtitles.