Lidice Place stands at the entrance to the Lower Precinct. It contains a decorative plaque commemorating another of Coventry’s friendship links born out of suffering, this time with Lidice.

Lidice is a village in the Czech Republic not far from Prague. It stands near the site of a previous village which was completely destroyed on 10 June 1942 on the orders of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich.

Heydrich was a principal architect of the Holocaust. He chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference which formalised plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”—the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe. Many historians regard Heydrich as the darkest figure within the Nazi regime. Hitler described him as “the man with the iron heart”.

Upon his arrival in Prague, Heydrich sought to eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation by suppressing Czech culture and deporting and executing members of the Czech resistance. He was directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces that travelled in the wake of the German armies and murdered more than two million people by mass shooting and gassing, including 1.3 million Jews.

After training by the British Special Operations, two Czechoslovak resistance operatives attacked and wounded Heydrich who later died of his wounds.

Lidice was chosen as a target for reprisals because its residents were suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans and were falsely associated with aiding members of the assassination team. 192 men, 60 women and 88 children people from Lidice were murdered. The village of Lidice was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed with explosives.

After the war, some of the villagers who survived were rehoused in a new village of Lidice overlooking the original site. The first part of the new village was built using money raised in Britain and completed in 1949.

The village now has a museum, a memorial and an art gallery which displays permanent and temporary exhibitions. The annual children’s art competition attracts entries from around the world.

Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, Lidice. Photo by Ashley Pomeroy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86777218