These 82 children were then transported to the extermination camp 70 kilometers away. Once they arrived, they were gassed to death. This remarkable sculpture by Marie Uchytilová commemorates this massacre.
These were not Jewish children. They were Roman Catholic.
The world first learned about Lidice via a brutally detached Nazi radio announcement broadcast the day after the attack: “All male inhabitants have been shot. The women have been transferred to a concentration camp. The children have been taken to educational centers. All houses of Lidice have been leveled to the ground, and the name of this community has been obliterated.”
Although the Nazis hoped to make an example of Lidice by erasing it from history, their bold proclamation, accompanied by ample photographic evidence of the atrocity, infuriated the Allies to such an extent that Frank Knox, secretary of the U.S. Navy, proclaimed, “If future generations ask us what we were fighting for in this war, we shall tell them the story of Lidice.”
When news of the Lidice massacre broke, the international community responded with outrage and a promise to keep the town’s memory alive. A small neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois, adopted Lidice’s name, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt released a statement praising the gesture: “The name of Lidice was to be erased from time,” he said. “Instead of being killed as the Nazis would have it, Lidice has been given new life.” In the English district of Stoke-on-Trent, Member of Parliament Barnett Stross led a “Lidice Shall Live” campaign and raised money for rebuilding efforts. Artists further immortalized the tragedy in works including poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Massacre of Lidice.
In comparison, the Allied response to the Nazis’ Final Solution, which claimed the lives of six million Jews (including 263,000 Czech Jews), was deliberately measured. On December 17, 1942, the U.S., British and other Allied governments issued a statement condemning the Nazis’ annihilation of European Jews, but they were hesitant to overemphasize the Jews’ plight. The people of Lidice were seen as universal victims—peaceful civilians who had the misfortune to witness the Nazis’ disregard for human life firsthand. Europe’s Jewish population represented a far more politically charged demographic. Amidst rising anti-Semitic sentiment and German propaganda accusing the Allies of bowing to “Jewish interests,” Lidice emerged as a neutral, indisputably despicable example of Nazi immorality. Discussion of the Holocaust, on the other hand, raised an entirely separate debate.
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