Torn from sleep, the inhabitants of Lidice understand nothing of what’s happening to them—or they understand all too well. They are dragged from their beds, they are driven from their houses with rifle butts, and herded into the village square, in front of the church. Nearly five hundred men, women, and children, dressed hastily, stand there dumbstruck and terrified, surrounded by the uniformed men of the Schutzpolizei. They cannot know that this unit has been brought here specially from Halle-an-der-Saale, Heydrich’s hometown. But they do know that nobody will be going to work tomorrow. Then the Germans begin to do what will soon become their favorite occupation: they divide the group in two. Women and children are locked up in the school, while the men are led to a farmhouse and crammed into the cellar. Now they must wait, interminably, the anguish etched into their faces. Inside the school, the children weep. Outside, the Germans are let off the leash. Frenetically but conscientiously, they pillage and ransack each of the ninety-six houses in the village, plus all the public buildings, including the church. All books and paintings, considered to be useless objects, are thrown from the windows, piled up in the square, and burned. Anything considered useful—radios, bicycles, sewing machines—is taken away. This work takes several hours, and by the time it’s finished, Lidice is in ruins.
At five in the morning, the soldiers come back to get them. The inhabitants find their village turned upside down and filled with running, shouting policemen who continue to plunder everything they can find. The women and children are taken in trucks toward the neighboring town of Kladno. For the women, this is the first stage on their journey to Ravensbrück. The children will be separated from their mothers and gassed in Chełmno—with the exception of a few judged suitable for Germanization, who will be adopted by German families. The men are assembled before a wall where the mattresses have been dumped. The youngest is fifteen, the eldest eighty-four. Five are lined up and shot. Then five more, and so on. The mattresses are there to prevent the bullets ricocheting. But the men of the Schupo are not as experienced in such matters as the Einsatzgruppen, and—with all the pauses for carrying away the corpses and forming new firing squads—it takes forever. Hours pass while the men await their turn. To speed the process up, they decide to double the rate and shoot them ten by ten. The village mayor, whose job it is to identify the men before their execution, is among the last to be killed. Thanks to him, the Germans spare nine men who are not from the village but simply visiting friends and trapped there by the curfew or invited to stay the night. They will, however, be executed in Prague. When nineteen night workers return from their shifts, they find their village devastated, their families vanished, the bodies of their friends still warm. And, as the Germans are still there, they, too, are shot. Even the dogs are killed.
But that isn’t all. Hitler has decided to vent all his frustrations on Lidice, so the village will serve as a means of catharsis and as a symbol of his avenging rage. The Reich’s inability to find and punish Heydrich’s assassins provokes a systematic hysteria beyond all human bounds. The order is that Lidice must be wiped off the map—literally. The cemetery is desecrated, the orchards destroyed, all the buildings burned, and salt thrown over the earth to make sure that nothing can ever grow here. The village is now nothing more than a hellish furnace. Bulldozers have even been sent to raze the ruins. Not a single trace of the village must remain, not even a hint of its former location.