The Winds of Change: The Path to Lidice, #5

By Alan Gerrard

The Path to Lidice is a series of ebooks that look into the relationships between Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, and the USA from the mid-1930s to the late 1960s. Roughly, this equates to the accession to supreme power in Germany of Adolf Hitler and ends with the fall of Alexander Dubček, the liberalizing President of Czechoslovakia in 1969.

 

The series examines international efforts to build a new Lidice from two main perspectives: the US-inspired Lidice Lives campaign, and its UK counterpart, the Lidice Shall Live movement. 

 

Often overlooked by historians, both are sometimes treated as a distant by-product of Operation Anthropoid - the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Save the general references, such as "Lidice was rebuilt with the help of British miners..." there has been a dearth of satisfactory material dealing with how the village of Lidice came to be rebuilt, following its destruction at the hands of the Nazis, amongst our bookshelves and in the download sections of libraries.

2022 marks the 80th Anniversary of both the Lidice Shall Live campaign and the Lidice Lives movement; so we thought we would lay things out for readers keen to acquire further insight into this unique facet of 1940s wartime, social history.  

 

The story starts with Volume 1 in Munich and the signing of the agreement which seals the fate of the Czechoslovak nation. In London Chamberlain returns a hero but the euphoria soon corrodes as it soon transpires that Hitler's demands have not abated. Indeed, Nazi Germany was to occupy the whole of Bohemia and Moravia on the 15th March 1939. 

 

By September 1941 Recihprotektor Von Neurath is deemed to be "too soft" on the Czechs. To his replacement death is vapid and the Czechs are inferior. A more disturbing vision for the future one could not conjure...

 

Volume 5 brings the cessation of conflict and so begins a climate of growing unease and distrust between the world's superpowers which is to eventually lead to the near-complete freezing of diplomatic relations between East and West, climaxing in the mid-1960s with the final descent of an iron curtain across all parts of Central and Eastern Europe. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Gerrard
• Release date: Nov 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201632014

Book preview

A TIME FOR ACTION – A NEW LIDICE

A DECLARATION

On the face of it, the situation immediately after the war seemed favourable for developing contacts between Britain and Czechoslovakia - there was full cooperation between the freshly coalescing political establishment in Prague and the British Lidice Shall Live committee. In most cases, the mediator was the Czechoslovak Embassy in London. Contact between the Lidice Shall Live committee and the founding committee, which was to lead to the full Society for the Reconstruction of Lidice took place in 1945 thanks to the Secretary of the British-Czechoslovak Friendship Club, the redoubtable Frank Hampl, and Czechoslovak Member of Parliament Julius Firt, a former member of the Czech Government-in-exile and contact at the London office of the Lidice Shall Live Committee.

On June 10th, 1945, reportedly some 100 thousand people gathered on the gentle slopes of Lidice to attend the first commemorative event. They came as pilgrims, as organisations, as families, as individuals. Czechoslovakian resistance fighters from both world wars came together with the soldiers, partisans, fighters who had put their lives at stake during the last days of the war, during the Czech national uprising in cities, towns and villages, on the barricades of Prague. Kladno miners and steelworkers came to pay their last respect to their colleagues. From a makeshift grandstand, constructed to facilitate the many Governmental and international dignitaries, the Minister of the lnterior of the National Assembly, Václav Nosek declared the following in his statement to the crowd:

...there can be and will be no appeasement between the world of fascism and darkness and that of democracy and freedom: only one 'relationship can be there - that of struggle, a struggle for life and death, a struggle until the final victory...

What would come as a shock to many of the audience present would be the announcement that the Government of the Republic of Czechoslovakia was about to start building a new Lidice, as Nosek continued:

10 June 1942 saw the village of Lidice in the Kladno political district destroyed and razed to the ground...the name of the village was to have been erased forever. This atrocious crime marks one of the hardest periods in the Czech nation's life. It enraged not only the people of Czechoslovakia but of all freedom-loving nations. To redress this tragedy, the government of the Czechoslovak Republic made a solemn resolution at its meeting on 6th June 1945 to build a new Lidice. As the Minister of Interior, I announce that we will renew the village of Lidice in the liberated Czechoslovak Republic in its original boundaries along with its historic Czech official name.

Worldwide condemnation and goodwill had stirred the intention to build the village of Lidice anew the instant it was destroyed. But in dealing with the practicalities of realising the vision, it was left to the re-emerging Czechoslovak Government to establish some vehicle for managing the sensitive and complicated processes involved in the resettling and rehabilitation of survivors, as well as the construction of a new community. Whatever this organisation was would have to protect Lidice’s survivors and renew the village. To this end two organisations were established: a short-term Preparatory Committee of the Society for the Restoration of Lidice and a Local National Committee of Lidice. The Local National Committee of Lidice, whose first Chairwoman was Helena Leflerová was run like a town council and included other Lidice women - it held a seat at the District National Committee at Kladno and had the usual municipal and economic agendas. The Preparatory Committee had five members: the Minister of the Interior of the National Government, Václav Nosek; Ladislav Kopřiva, Chairman of Zemský of the National Committee in Prague; Jaroslav Mildorf, Chairman of the District National Committee in Kladno; Helena Leflerová, Chairwoman of the Local National Committee of Lidice; Anna Hroníková as a representative of the Lidice women; and František Knor, who was also appointed to the position Secretary General. The Preparatory Committee’s main task was to participate in the preparation of the law founding the Society for the Restoration of Lidice, to take care of the returned