Prague, July 13 (CTK) – On Thursday, President Milos Zeman signed amendments to the national holidays law enacting two new Czech significant days commemorating resistance and tragic events of World War Two, spokesman Jiri Ovcacek has told journalists.
The Second Resistance Heroes Day will be commemorated on June 18.
The second holiday will commemorate the annihilation of the Terezin family camp in Auschwitz on March 9, 1944, Ovcacek said.
As of Thursday, not the razing to the ground of the Lidice village by the Nazi regime, but the memory of the victims of the crime will be commemorated on June 10, he added.
The Terezin family camp was a special section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camps to which some 17,500 inmates from the Jewish ghetto in Terezin (Theresienstadt), north Bohemia, were gradually deported in 1943 and 1944. All 3,792 men, women and children, mainly Czechoslovak Jews, were murdered in gas chambers in the night of March 9, 1944.
This was the biggest mass murder of Czechoslovak citizens.
The Second Resistance Heroes Day will be held in memory of the Czechoslovak paratroopers who killed chief of the Reich Main Security Office Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942.
It is to mark the last day of the fight of the seven Czechoslovak paratroopers who found shelter in an Orthodox church in Prague after the assassination of Heydrich. The seven men resisted the Nazi forces in the church crypt until the last moment. They all died there on June 18, 1942.
The Nazis reacted to Heydrich’s assassination by the declaration of martial law and mass executions. The whole villages of Lidice, central Bohemia, and Lezaky, east Bohemia, were razed to the ground.
Significant days of the Czech Republic have a rather symbolic character. Unlike state and other holidays, they are common workdays unless they fall on weekend.
There are 11 significant days in the Czech calendar so far, three of which are directly related to WWII.
