Photo: Military History Institute
Hundreds of villages in the European military theatre of World War II became the target of Nazi massacres, where entire populations of inhabitants were systematically murdered and the villages razed to the ground. But perhaps none became more famous than the Czech village of Lidice.
The women and children were sent to a makeshift detention centre in a school in Kladno, from where the majority were deported to concentration camps; the women to Ravensbrück, where 60 of them died, and the children to the Chełmno extermination camp in Poland, where they were gassed to death in trucks by exhaust fumes. Of Lidice’s 105 children, only 17 survived the war. Approximately 340 people in total were murdered.
A small number of the children were deemed to be suitable for Aryanisation and were sent to Germany to live with pro-Nazi German families to be “re-educated”. After the war, the Czechoslovak government made efforts to find these children and repatriate them, but it took more than two years to find all of them and bring them home. The 143 women and 17 children who survived the war returned to their destroyed hometown and founded a new community, 300 metres from the original location.
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