01/18/2026
Another time, another place -
yet looking more like us everyday.
On June 10, 1942, the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia awoke to trucks of N**i soldiers. Men were separated from women, women from children. Families were torn apart in the village square.
The 173 men and boys over 16 were executed by firing squad. The 184 women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. And 82 children, from infants to teenagers, were taken away, screaming for their mothers. Most never saw their families again.
This atrocity was a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. The N**is falsely believed the village had aided the assassins and chose Lidice as a warning.
After killing the men and deporting the women, the N**is destroyed the village completely. Houses burned, the church was dynamited, the cemetery plowed, and the stream running through the village redirected. They aimed to erase Lidice entirely.
The children were sent to Łódź, Poland, where N**i doctors assessed them. Thirteen were deemed racially suitable and sent to Germany to be “Germanized,” given new names and families. The remaining 69 children were sent to Chełmno extermination camp, killed in gas vans. Only a handful survived the war.
For decades, the story of Lidice’s children lived in archives, fading photographs, and memories. Then Marie Uchytilová, a Czech sculptor born in 1924, decided to give them back their faces.
Starting in the 1970s, Uchytilová spent 20 years researching: studying photographs, tracking relatives, and recreating each child’s unique features. She rejected abstract symbolism, insisting that each child should be recognizable and individual.
In 1995, the memorial was unveiled. 82 life-sized bronze children stand in groups where the village once existed. Some are small, some nearly adult height. They face the direction of the destroyed village, frozen in time yet hauntingly alive. There are no plaques with names—just children, waiting.
The memorial doesn’t teach history through text. It teaches through presence. Visitors walk silently among the figures, feeling the enormity of lives stolen and futures erased. It transforms statistics into individuals, ensuring the murdered children are remembered not as numbers, but as real children with faces, families, and dreams.
Marie Uchytilová passed away in 2016 at age 91, having dedicated a quarter of her life to this project. She never met the children, never saved them, but ensured that their memory would endure.
Today, Lidice’s children stand in bronze, a permanent testament to innocence destroyed and resilience remembered. The N**is attempted to erase a village, its families, and its children. Instead, thanks to Uchytilová, 82 children still wait, still remembered, still seen.
