RESURRECTION OF LIDICE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 June 1943, Page 4

RESURRECTION OF LIDICE

RECOGNISED BY NAZI SPOKESMAN. The story of the resurrection of the town of Lidice, in Illinois, was a disturbing bit of news to the Nazi propagandists, states an exchange. First, they tried to silence it. But the story got across the ocean and through the sealed frontiers of Greater Germany. It became known to the Czech people through the Czechoslovak broadcast in London, Moscow and Boston. On October 18 it was confirmed to the Czech masses officially by no less a personality than the S.S. Gruppenfuehrer and the State Secretary of Bohemia, K. H. Frank. In a public speech delivered on the occasion of a celebration held in connection with the renaming of the Vltava Quay in Prague to “Reinhard Heydrich Ufer” on October 18, he warned the Czechs that they have just one more chance to reform and to repent, but that it will be the last chance. He deplored the fact that a “part of Czech people succumbs again to the whispering campaign of a clique of Czech emigrants in London” and said that German measures against the culprits “will not be stopped by a requiem Mass served for the Czech bishop Gorazd in the Cathedral of St. Paul in London nor by the American fad and folly of rechristening Lidice.” The official confirmation of the fact that Lidice was resurrected in the United States as a symbol of the sympathy of the American people with the Czechoslovak cause created a deep impression on the masses of the Czech people and intensified their opposition against 1 the hated oppressors.