Lidice

On our last day in Prague, instead of going to the musical instrument museum Collin and I made a trip out to the village where his great grandmother's family lived. It was completely razed in World War II by the Nazis because the villagers were falsely accused of helping in the assassination plot of Reinhard Heydrich. Hitler's orders were as follows:

"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."

These orders were carried out in full until nothing remained of the town. The Nazis burned Lidice to the ground and then bombed the remaining buildings. They even dug up the graves of the old cemetery. 

The museum had some very personalized pictures of people in Lidice that were especially touching, captioned with things like "this is the miller's son with his cousin, who lived in house 47, two days before the tragedy." It was a shock to look at their happiness so soon before such an awful tragedy.

One part of the memorial I thought was especially beautiful was the rose garden. My family has a bit of history with roses- both my grandfather and my father are avid rose gardeners and my favorite part of spring is when all the roses at my house start blooming. Apparently people bring roses from all over the world and plant them in the rose garden in memory of Lidice. Even though the roses were dormant and covered in a blanket of snow, it was a beautiful part of the memorial. I would have loved to bring a clipping of one of our roses. I can only imagine how spectacular it is in the summer!

The museum was very well done and made the tragedy a personal experience, including a video with interviews from surviving children who were Germanized and later returned to the village. One person who was interviewed said that when she returned to her mother she had forgotten how to speak Czech and only knew German, so she could only communicate with her mother through an interpreter. Her mother died about six months after they were reunited. It is impossible to imagine the hardship the villagers of Lidice went through, but visiting the site of the tragedy made it feel like the history was still alive and personal. It also felt much more personal going with someone with such a direct connection to the tragedy. As horrifying as it is, it's important to learn about the atrocities of World War II to remember what was lost and keep history from repeating itself.