Prague, June 27 (CTK) – The Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament, passed today a bill that would introduce three new significant days, including the day in memory of the victims of the Nazi obliteration of the Lidice village on June 10.
The MPs approved the draft legislation in the wording of the Senate, the upper house, that proposed small modifications.
President Milos Zeman is now to sign the bill into law.
Under the new legislation, June 18 will become the Day of the Second Resistance Heroes in memory of the Czechoslovak paratroopers who killed high-ranking Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, and on March 9, Czechs will commemorate the liquidation of the Terezin family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswieczim-Brzezinka) in 1944.
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, MP Robin Bohnisch said.
The Day of the Second Resistance Heroes 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. However, one of the group betrayed them. 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.
Lidice, a village with some 500 inhabitants, was razed to the ground on June 10, 1942. All 173 men were executed directly in Lidice and another 26 inhabitants were shot dead later in Prague. Women and children were sent to concentration camps, while some of the children were selected for re-education in Germany. Fifty-three women died in the camps and 82 children were killed by gas. After the war, only 143 women and 17 children from Lidice gradually returned to the country.
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.
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