Lidice and Terezín
July 11th, 2014
Lidice
In May of 1942, a group of British parachuters assassinated Reich Protecter Reinhard Heydrich. As part of his retribution, Hitler chose to punish the nearby village of Lidice, which was home to over 500 people.
"Adolf Hitler gave the following orders for Lidice:
All adult men to be shot.
All women to be sent to a concentration camp.
Children suitable for Germanization to be placed in SS families in the Reich. The rest to be re-educated by other means.
The village to be razed to the ground."
"The last school photo was taken on 2 June 1942, eight days before the tragedy."
"The tragedy of Lidice had a sad sequel on 16 June 1942, when
another twenty-six of its inhabitants were shot at the shooting range in
Prague-Kobylisy. They included fifteen members of the Horak and Stříbrný families and also seven workers, who
were working a night shift on the fatal day of 10 June 1942. The execution
squad also shot František Pitín, who had managed to excape Lidice, Bohumil Pospíšil,
who was brought from the Kladno hospital, and Joself Doležal
and Josef Nerad, who had both just turned fifteem. During an identity check of
the Lidice children in the Kladno grammar school, it was found that they had
reached fifteen years of age a few days before. For that reason they were also
sent to Kobylisy to be shot."
Terezín
The concentration camp Terezín, located in Northern Bohemia, served as a holding camp, where prisoners were kept before being sent to death camps. Although Terezín was not an extermination camp, around 33,000 people died there.
