People, stop and listen to the
message of children killed by war!
Hurry up to tell all that everything
is dependant on a spider's thread!
I know it! But I cannot do anything
else but these statues of children - to the best of my skills ....
of the academic sculptor Marie Uchytilova 1987)
It is built on the site of a previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi created Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was, as per orders directly from Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On June 10, 1942, all 192 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered on the spot by the Germans in a much publicised atrocity. The rest of the population were sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed. All men of the village were rounded up and taken to the farmstead of the Horák family on the edge of the village. Shooting of the men commenced at about 7 a.m. At first the men were shot in groups of five. The dead were left lying where they fell . There were 173 dead bodies lying in the Horák farm orchard.
All the women and children of the village were taken first to Lidice village school. They were then taken to the nearby town of Kladno where they were detained in the grammar school for three days. The children were then forcibly separated from their mothers. Four women were pregnant and were sent to the same hospital where Heydrich died. They were given forced abortions and then sent to different concentration camps.
Eighty-eight Lidice children were transported to the area of the former textile factory in Gneisenaustreet of Łódź. The children were not fed sufficiently and a few babies cared for by the older girls were constantly crying with hunger. The children slept on plain floors and covered themselves with coats if they had any brought from home. They suffered from a lack of hygiene and from illnesses.
The village of Lidice was set on fire and the remains of the buildings were bulldozed, every last remaining piece of evidence being destroyed. Even those buried in the town cemetery were not spared. Their remains were dug up and destroyed.
Altogether, about 340 people from Lidice died because of the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children).
The death toll resulting from the effort to avenge the death of Heydrich is estimated at 1,300. This count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites suspected of disloyalty and random victims like those from Lidice.
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