Lidice and Terezin

Last week we took a day trip to Lidice and Terezin…both of which I hadn’t ever really heard about. However, after visiting them, it’s really crazy to see how quickly people forget things and forget or modify the past. It was also crazy to discover just how real the Holocaust was to people in Europe. As Americans, I don’t think we fully grasp the brutality and inhumanity of it all…and after seeing how desperate the Czech Republic was for a savior from Nazi control, it is really easy to see how they fell into the hands of the Soviet Union. Most camps in the Czech Republic were liberated by the Soviets, not the United States…this alone already determined the fate of the Czech Republic and its relationship to the USSR. It had to choose between the 2 superpowers, and they went with the one who had actually helped them most when they were under the power of a fascist dictator.

Lidice was a small mining village just outside of Prague. During WWII commandos had been sent from England to the Czech Republic to assassinate Heydrich (the Nazi security police chief). The attempt wounded him, and he died within a few days. Somehow a connection was made between Heydrich’s assassination and a family living in Lidice. The Nazis conducted 3 searches of the village without finding any evidence of the link between the assassination and Lidice. However, Hitler wanted revenge for the death, so orders were carried out to completely destroy the village. The 173 men of the village were collected together and shot. Workers from a concentration camp buried their bodies in a mass grave. The women went to Ravensbruck concentration camp. The children were also sent to extermination camps except the few who were appropriate for “Germanization” and were adopted by German families to be re-educated. It was never clear what the fate of the children was…but 88 of them were never heard from again. The Nazis then burned and razed the village to the ground. Of course this was not the worst of fascist tactics, but many people in the West took up the cause for Lidice and started “Lidice Lives” campaigns.

Terezin was one of the main work camps in the Czech Republic. It was basically used as a waiting place for transportations to other concentration and extermination camps. Out of the 87,000 prisoners who left on the transports, less than 4,000 survived. It was just crazy sitting there watching and listening to this video. It would talk about the transports from Terezin…1000 to Auschwitz, 2 survivors; 1000 to Dachau, no survivors; 17,000 to Auschwitz, 80 survivors, etc. While Terezin was not used as an extermination camp, many prisoners were executed or died from horrible living conditions. Over the entrance hung the words on all Nazi camps…work will make you free. Terezin was also the name of the city that housed the work camp. The city was used as a Jewish ghetto in WWII. The 7000 residents were forced to evacuate, and some 140,000 Jews were relocated to Terezin. In one building, there were 6000 people living in the attic.

It was definitely a hard day to get through…one of the few times I have truly confronted the past firsthand. Merely talking about something makes it easier to swallow…but go to a place where the rooms still small of urine and sweat…and where 60 men were forced to stand and sleep in a room with a single 3-inch diameter hole to breath through and no toilet…or where corpses were thrown into a room to await cremation…and history becomes a little more real and a little harder to choke down.

The monument dedicated to the 88 lost children of Lidice.


"Work Will Make You Free" over the Terezin work camp.