Lidice (German: Liditz) is a village in the Kladno District of the Czech Republic, 22km northwest of Prague. It is built near the site of the previous village of the same name, which was completely destroyed in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. The village is first mentioned in writing in 1318. After the industrialisation of the area, many of its people worked in mines and factories in the neighbouring cities of Kladno and Slaný. Lidice was chosen as a target for reprisals in the wake of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, because its residents were suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans and were falsely associated with aiding team members of Operation Anthropoid. Altogether, about 340 people from Lidice were murdered because of the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children). The village of Lidice was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed with explosives. After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned. They were rehoused in a new village of Lidice that was built overlooking the original site, built using money raised by the Lidice Shall Live campaign, initiated by Sir Barnett Stross and based in north Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. The first part of the new village was completed in 1949. An art gallery, which displays permanent and temporary exhibitions, is in the new village 500m from the museum. The annual children's art competition attracts entries from around the world. In 1943, the Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinů, wrote the musical work, Memorial to Lidice. In 2017, to mark the 75th anniversary of this terrible tragedy, the English composer, Vic Carnall, wrote his Opus 17, In Memoriam: the Village of Lidice (Czechoslovakia / June, 1942), a work for solo piano.
