Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, Lidice

The Memorial to the Children Victims of the War (

Second World War as a part of the Lidice massacre.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Work began on the memorial in 1980, but it was not until 2000, ten years after Uchytilová's death, that it was completed by her husband. The "Garden of Peace and Friendship" adjoins the memorial.

Background

On 10 June 1942 the Nazis killed all 173 adult men and 52 women in Lidice as a reprisal for the assassination of Nazi official

children who were considered suitable to be "Germanized" were removed, and the remaining women and children, separated, were sent to concentration camps.^[3]^[4] The children were gassed that summer in mobile vans at Chełmno.^[5] Following the war, a cross was erected at Lidice in remembrance of the murdered children, but little else occurred for the next two decades.^[2]

Features

In 1980, the sculptor Marie Uchytilová began plans for a memorial which would not only commemorate the local children who died at the camps but symbolize the "13 million child victims of World War II."

Jiří Václav Hampl [cs], to complete the work in bronze castings.^[6]

Financing of the memorial was facilitated by donations from the Government of the Czech Republic, as well as individual and foreign donors. The memorial, with statues rotated facing forward for 180 degrees, was finally erected in 2000. With a view of the old town of Lidice, it is set in a meadow where the villagers had been killed during the war.