US town of Crest Hill commemorates Lidice massacre
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Loading... - Pavel Svoboda
- 13 Jul 2022
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Eighty years ago, the Nazis massacred the village of Lidice, hoping to wipe it off the face of the Earth. But it had quite the opposite effect. Various places around the world adopted the name Lidice, so that it would never be forgotten. One of them is the town of Crest Hill near Chicago, which has its own Lidice neighbourhood.
As the tones of BedÅ™ich Smetana’s My Country pour from loudspeakers, three men in Sokol uniforms carry the American and Czech flags to a stone plaque. It reads that it stands in memory of the Czechoslovak village of Lidice and its citizens who were massacred by the Nazis on June 10, 1942.
The annual Lidice commemoration was held in Crest Hill earlier this week on the occasion of a visit of the Czech Senate delegation. It was only two days after the Lidice horror, when a local real estate entrepreneur Dominic Romano named part of the town where he owned land Lidice.
A month later, in July 1942, thousands of people took to the streets to demonstrate against the atrocity and installed a memorial dedicated to Lidice. Local Czech-American resident, as Vera Wilt, says it was an act of defiance:
“In think when Hitler said he would wipe the name Lidice off the face of the earth, Americans and other people around the world took it as a challenge and said: No it is not!
“It was a gut reaction, it came from the heart, not from the mind. They just thought: We can’t allow that to happen. We will build the monument.”
The original memorial in Crest Hill has since been replaced by a new one, but it still stands in a small park in a residential neighbourhood that has carried the name of Lidice for 80 years. Read More...
