"Lidice, village, Czech Republic, just northwest of Prague. Before World War II it was a mining settlement of the Kladno coal basin and had a population of about 450. On June 10, 1942, it was “liquidated” by German armed forces as part of a massive reprisal for the assassination by Czech underground fighters of Reinhard Heydrich (“Heydrich the Hangman”), deputy leader of the SS. On June 9, five days after Heydrich died of bomb injuries, the SS rounded up Lidice’s inhabitants. The 172 men were shot the next day. The women, except for 7 who were shot on the spot or who had been shot earlier trying to flee, were transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where 49 died (7 by gas) and 3 “disappeared.” The 90 children, after one had been shot running away, were screened and found “racially pure” and were dispersed through Germany to be renamed and raised as Germans. Local miners (19 men) who were missed on the first round were executed later in Prague. When the massacre and deportation were complete, the SS burned Lidice, dynamited what was left standing, and leveled the debris."
(Lidice before Heydrich's assassination)
(Lidice Today)
(Lidice Memorial)
(Lidice Children's Memorial)
(Lidice Children's Memorial)
(Lidice Children's Memorial)
The next stop on our day of happy tours was the town of Terezin. Terezin had been used as a concentration camp for most of the Jews from Prague. Although it was a concentration camp thousands of people died here. Once the children who were living here turned 15 most of them were transported to Auschwitz. Today the town is deserted, but it's hard to imagine it being an awful place to live because it is almost pretty in some ways. Later in the week we also got to hear from two people who had been in Terezin and both of whom were then transported to Auschwitz and lived. Needless to say it has not been an uplifting week.
"The Theresienstadt "camp-ghetto" existed for three and a half years, between November 24, 1941 and May 9, 1945. During its existence, Theresienstadt served three purposes: First, Theresienstadt served as a transit camp for Czech Jews whom the Germans deported to killing centers, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps in German-occupied Poland, Belorussia, and the Baltic States. Second, it was a ghetto-labor camp to which the SS deported and then incarcerated certain categories of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews, based on their age, disability as a result of past military service, or domestic celebrity in the arts and other cultural life. To mislead about or conceal the physical annihilation of the Jews deported from the Greater German Reich, the Nazi regime employed the general fiction, primarily inside Germany, that the deported Jews would be deployed at productive labor in the East. Since it seemed implausible that elderly Jews could be used for forced labor, the Nazis used Theresienstadt to hide the nature of the deportations. Third, Theresienstadt served as a holding pen for Jews in the above-mentioned groups. It was expected that that poor conditions there would hasten the deaths of many deportees, until the SS and police could deport the survivors to killing centers in the East. Neither a "ghetto" as such nor strictly a concentration camp, Theresienstadt served as a “settlement,” an assembly camp, and a concentration camp, and thus had recognizable features of both ghettos and concentration camps. In its function as a tool of deception, Theresienstadt was a unique facility."
(Terezin Mass Graves)
(Terezin Mass Graves)
(Terezin)
(Terezin)
(Terezin)
(Terezin)
(Terezin)
(Terezin)
(Terezin)
(Terezin)
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