LIDICE MEMORIAL

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23321, 3 October 1945, Page 6

LIDICE MEMORIAL

Crown Of Iron Thorns “Another pious visit took me to Lidice,” writes the Dean of Canterbury, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, in the “Christian Science Monitor.” “Once it was a village, now it is a ploughed field: its happy rural community of 600 souls was killed or scattered. Two hundred men were shot at dawn. Women were sent to concentration camps. Children torn from parents’ arms were sent to Germany. “I spoke with a mother just returned from captivity to visit the site of her old home. She showed me the picture of her young husband standing beside the truck that he drove. She lost him, and there is no trace of her child of three, which the Germans took away from her. “Only one memorial stands, perhaps the most moving memorial of the war. At the end of the bare rising ground stands a rough pine pole 20 feet high. At the junction of a cross pole nailed to its upper end, is a five-foot iron hoop, wound round with barbed wire strands: a cross and crown of thorns. It was placed there by Red Army men on their own Initiative.”