The "A Town Once Known As Lidice!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  June 10, 1942 and the small village of Lidice was under siege!  Lidice was located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during WWII.  It was on this date in history that Adolf Hitler ordered the assassination of all men over the age of 16 in the town of Lidice in reprisal for the assassination of a Nazi official, Reinhard Heydrich, in the Spring of 1942.  The women and children were taken to concentration camps or gassed and the village of Lidice was destroyed.  One man had luckily escaped alive and urged the United Nations to destroy several German villages by air bombardment as a retaliation for the Lidice massacre.  Mr. Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the area and was one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.  He was a brutal man known for killing anyone who stepped in the way of the Nazi resistance.  It was on May 27 of 1942 that he was being driven to his headquarters at Prague Castle when his car was attacked by two Czechoslovak resistance operatives.  Heydrich was wounded and died less than a week later.  German officials declared a state of emergency and established a curfew in Prague.  They tried to find the attackers promising anyone involved, and their families, would be killed.  The attackers were never found so Hitler decided to destroy the village of Lidice in reprisal. That town was chosen since they were said to harbor members of the local resistance.  On June 10, German police and SS officials surrounded the town to block off any escapes.  They rounded up 192 boys and men and lined them up at the edge of town and shot them in groups.   The women and children were loaded onto rail cars and transported to concentration camps.  Most were taken to Ravensbrück where 60 died.  A few of the children were considered racially pure and were handed over to SS families.  The rest were killed in late June when Nazi official Adolph Eichman ordered the children to be gassed to death at Chelmno extermination camp.  Close to 340 people from Lidice died and the town was destroyed by shelling it and setting it on fire.  What remained was plowed over and the name of the town was removed from all local municipal records.  People from around the world were angered which in turn gained support for Allied troops in support of the war on Hitler.  I, for one, was not a very good history student when I was in high school...or even in college, so reading about this awful event in history was very disturbing.  I pulled up story after story about the event on Lancaster Online and was amazed at what someone could do to people who had a disagreement with them.  One such story from July 5, 1942 was titled Lititz Candles Relight Smashed Czech Towns told of 6,000 hand-made Lititz, Pennsylvania candles - lights in the July 4th celebration - which threw an encouraging flame across the world to Bohemia-Moravia.  Now that every man in the Czech town of Lidice has been shot, all the women thrown into internment camps, all children taken to educational centers and the Czech town completely destroyed by the Nazi, the name of the village wiped off their records - the flames on those candles in the Lititz celebration take on a realistic significance.  The connection between the Lititz candles and the European holocaust is no mere flight of fancy.  The Lititz candles were a pledge to a principle that never did die out, as the Lititz candles demonstrate.  On the basis of the foregoing facts in my story, they are the very essence of it.  Story after story that I read in my local newspaper from 1942 told of the terror handed out to the town of Lidice.  Stories with titles such as "Exiled Czechs Vow Revenge On Nazis For Executions",  "CZECHS VOW TO AVENGE DEATHS", "HIMMLER'S TOLL MAY BE 10,000,000", and "Million Red Poppies Hide Scar Left by Nazis at Lidice," covered the pages of my Lancaster Newspaper for months on end.  It was actually hard to read even the headlines about the town of Lidice.  I did find an inspirational poem written by H.I. Phillips that was printed in the Monday, June 15, 1942 Lancaster New Era which I will end my story with today.  It reads...

("Every man in the Czech town of Lidice has been shot, all women thrown

into interment camps, all children taken away from the town completely destroyed by the

Nazi on a charge that the slayer of Heydrich was hidden there.")

This was a town

A country town that men and women loved -

A village such as you and I have known

And treasured in nostalgic memories. . .

Now is it but a twisted rubble pile

From which the smoke in thin formations curls

To write a ghastly tale of nazi ways.

The Village has its woods and templed hills -

Its rocks and rills, and knew the lowing herd -

Here people lived their sweetly simple lives

And listened to the song of brook and bird . . .

Now not a house invites the morning sun

To warm and cheer the happy folks inside;

One Nazi leader met a sudden death

And for it all things living here have died!

Here children roped and full their laughter rang - 

Here mothers deemed and fathers worked and planned

The dreams and plans so common to us all.

Of any peoples and of any land . . .

Now every father, every adult son

is dead, a bullet through his brain or breast;

Like cattle are the women driven off - To show us Nazi justice at its best!

Here music once was heard, and people danced

The "breezy call of incense-breathing morn"

Was known, and women tended flowerbeds,

And now and then another child was born . . .

Naught but a deathly silence marks it now - 

Gone every creature, every living thing

An Elite guardsman's killer passed this way -

And so a strange New Order has its fling!

These embers mark the playthings of a child. . .

A church once rose above those ashes there . . .

Here did the florist live and here a nurse . . .

And here the cobbler, carpenter and mayor . . .

Not one single human voice is heard . . .

"All male grown-ups within the town were shot";

"All women thrown into Nazi camp" . . .

And all because the Nazis charge a plot!

That hillside there was once a picnic ground . . .

The valley knew parades and springtime joy . . .

Here once were streets alive and green and day

And in those ashes - look! - a baby's toy!

Now death and desolation stalk the town

The savage way of beasts casts its spell

One German hangman near here met his death - 

And this is Nazi justice . . . mark it well!

It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.