#Monument
Lidice Memorial, Coventry
The memorial remembers the suffering of both Coventry and the town of Lidice in the former Czechoslovakia. Both civilian populations suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The memorial is a reminder of the freedoms that we now have today following the death of many people and damage caused to the city and village.
The Lidice Memorial in Coventry city centre commemorates one of the darker atrocities of the Second World War which took place in June 1942. The memorial was originally built in 1954 as a tribute by Coventry to the village of Lidice in Bohemia, then Czechoslovakia, which was destroyed by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a senior ranking SS officer and Nazi party official.
On 10 June 1942, Nazi forces rounded up all men in Lidice aged 15 and older and shot them. The women and children were deported to concentration camps. The village was razed to the ground and the remains of any buildings blown up with explosives. Some of the Lidice children were murdered at extermination camps. The aim of the Nazi’s was to erase Lidice from both map and history.
Coventry and Lidice are seen to share a symbolic bond of suffering. Coventry itself was heavily bombed during the war, particularly in the Blitz, and much of its city centre was destroyed. After the war, in 1947 Coventry twinned with Lidice, in recognition of the shared experience of wartime devastation and as a gesture of solidarity and remembrance.
The memorial in Coventry was rededicated on Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2017. At that ceremony, officials including the Lord Mayor of Coventry and representatives of the Czech Embassy laid white roses and reaffirmed the importance of remembering Lidice’s victims.