The Lidice Memorial looks after the memorial site on the location of the village of Lidice in the Kladno area, which the Nazis destroyed on 10 June 1942. Its mission is to preserve the memory of the annihilation of the village and the suffering of its inhabitants and to maintain the name of Lidice as a worldwide symbol of the victims of war crimes.[2] The site was declared a cultural monument on 3 March 1962 and a National Cultural Monument by government decree on 16 August 1995.[2]
The village before 1942
The first written mention of Lidice dates from 1309; the oldest public building was the parish church of St Martin from 1352. It was destroyed during the Hussite Wars and a second time during the Thirty Years' War. A new Baroque church was built by Grand Duchess Maria Anna of Tuscany.[1] The school is first mentioned in 1690 as a branch of the school in Buštěhrad. In 1713 it was attended by 127 children and, according to the source, it had central heating, probably the first of its kind in Bohemia. A new single-storey building was erected in 1824.[1] The development of Kladno industry transformed the life of the village in the second half of the 19th century into the life of miners and ironworkers: in 1848 it had 270 inhabitants in 33 houses, and by 1890 already 506 inhabitants in 50 houses.[1]
The events of June 1942
After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who was mortally wounded on 27 May 1942, the Kladno Gestapo became suspicious of a letter that had come into the hands of a co-owner of a factory in Slaný. It was connected with a family in Lidice whose son served in the Czechoslovak army in Great Britain. Nothing incriminating was found, yet the German officials decided on revenge against the inhabitants of the village.[1] On the night of 10 June 1942, when 503 people lived in the village, an operation began that the perpetrators themselves filmed. The footage served as document no. 379 at the Nuremberg trial in 1945.[1] According to the memorial, 173 men were shot on the orders of K. H. Frank. The women and children were taken to a gymnasium in Kladno, where they were separated after three days. Children selected for Germanisation and children under one year of age were removed, while the others died in gas vans in Chełmno nad Nerem. The women were taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.[1]
The memorial and the memorial site
The first monument was the one at the men's grave, unveiled by soldiers of the Red Army on 3 June 1945. At the beginning of the 1950s the first museum was opened, and in 1962 a new one, designed by the architect František Marek.[2] In June 1955 the Garden of Peace and Friendship was incorporated into the site; it was founded on the initiative of the English physician Sir Barnett Stross, and 29,000 rose bushes from 32 countries were planted.[2] The monument to the 82 children who died in Chełmno was created by the sculptor Marie Uchytilová; the first statues stood in 1995 and the group was completed in 2000.[2] The memorial site also contains works by Bedřich Stefan, Karel Lidický and Karel Hladík.[2] In 1967 Stross called on artists from around the world to create the Lidice Collection of Modern Art.[2]
Current organisation
The Ministry of Culture established the Lidice Memorial as a state-funded organisation as of 31 December 2000; its first task was the restoration of neglected buildings and the site.[2] In 2003 the Rose Garden was restored and the Lidice Gallery, to which the Lidice Collection was moved, was reconstructed. In June of the same year the International Children's Exhibition of Fine Arts Lidice, held every year in the gallery, returned. In 2004 the garden by the gallery was opened to the public and the Avenue of Dr Sir Barnett Stross was restored. In June 2006 the multimedia exhibition And the Innocent Were Guilty… was opened, and in April 2008, after reconstruction of the Pod Tribunou building, an educational centre for young people with a study room was opened.[2] The memorial states that it purchased the original family house by the gallery for an exhibition on the building of the new Lidice.[2]