Lidice Unearthed

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the destruction of Lidice. Last year, the Unearthed project created a sculpture to raise awareness of, and remember, both the atrocity and the incredible generosity of North Staffordshire’s miners.

The story of Lidice is one that should be shared far and wide. If you don’t know it, see this blog post. If you do know it, tell others. Don’t let the atrocity be forgotten – it’s when we forget that we allow such things to happen again. But also, don’t let the miners’ generosity be forgotten – it can, and should, inspire future generations to be the best they can be.

As well as a beautiful sculpture, the project created a series of videos, which illustrate the story of Lidice.

Lidice Shall Die

This first episode is the documentary that I saw at the Potteries Museum, when I first discovered the story of Lidice and Stoke-on-Trent.

Lidice Shall Live

This is a play that was performed to an unsuspecting audience in the Victoria Hall in Hanley, where the Lidice Shall Live movement was started seventy-one years before.

The Miners Raise Money

After the Lidice Shall Live movement was started, the miners of Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire raised £1,000,000 to help rebuild Lidice once the war was won.

Lidice Is Rebuilt

The final episode is a virtual tour of the Lidice memorial gardens and the new village.

The massacre of Lidice was an act of cold, calculated brutality, outrageous even by the standards of the regime that perpetrated it. It led to an act of outstanding generosity and compassion. North Staffordshire’s miners were living under rationing and still grieving from an explosion at Sneyd Green colliery that had killed 57 and devastated the local community. Yet they still gave a day’s wage each week to the Lidice Shall Live campaign. The dead of Lidice deserve to be remembered, because it is when we forget such things that we allow them to happen again. The miners and Sir Barnett Stross deserve to be remembered, because they reacted with compassion and generosity. In so doing they ensured that the evil did not prevail.