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| Europe |
| Forgetting to remember |
| 2007-07-05 |
| Civilian groups take matters into their own hands to commemorate WWII Resistance |
| Posted by:lotp |
| #1 Thank you for posting this, lotp. Few people seem to remember that risks must be taken in order to eliminate the real threats we face. Though separated by time and place, both tragedies were the fallout from one morning in May 1942 when resistance fighters attacked a Nazi convoy in Prague 8. As a result of that dayÂ’s events, one Nazi despot died, thousands of civilians were murdered and the future of the nation was cemented. “We are talking about the assassination of the most important officer of the Third Reich,” says military historian Michal Burian of the killing of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. “The Czech nation paid a bloody tax for this deed, but it had declared its resistance to the occupation clearly in front of all the world.” Furious, Hitler ordered the killing of thousands of civilians, resistance fighters and their collaborators. The villages of Lidice and Ležáky were razed and nearly all inhabitants killed. Kubiš and GabèÃk were betrayed by a comrade and died inside the church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius on Resslová street, where they were hiding. Some of the men, including Kubiš, died from Gestapo bullets, while others, like GabèÃk, committed suicide, Burian says. Despite the bloody reprisals, the killing of Heydrich was symbolically important for a nation downtrodden after the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which the United Kingdom, France and Italy handed parts of Bohemia and Moravia over to Hitler in an attempt to slake his thirst for war.“The assassination and the following reprisals Â… led to one of the most important moments of World War II from the point of view of Czechoslovakia: the renouncement of the Munich Agreement by Britain and France,” Burian says. The quantum butterfly strikes again! |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-07-05 23:48 |