The village of Lidice, located a few miles outside the Czechoslovak capital Prague, was the site of a paroxysm of vindictive, pitiless Nazi violence. On the night of June 9 1942, SS guards attempted to completely obliterate the village by killing or deporting its inhabitants, by eliminating every trace of humanity and even by exhuming the dead.
A total of 173 inhabitants were murdered on the spot. The rest were deported to the Nazi-operated extermination camps, where the village death toll rose to approximately 340. Those who survived suffered the fate of forced dispersal.
But an unlikely alliance of Staffordshire miners, a Stoke-on-Trent doctor and a town in Illinois were not prepared to let the memory of Lidice disappear. For decades they fought to put the village back on the map and to help rebuild it.
