Prague, June 17 (CTK) – The Czechoslovak Legionnaires Union and Prague 2 Mayor Jana Cernochova unveiled today two plaques commemorating the two couples who helped the paratroopers who killed Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and Acting Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, in 1942.
The unveiling of the commemorative plaques is a part of a project that is to highlight the heroes of the resistance by Karel Polata and the Czechoslovak Legionnaires Union.
They have installed 12 similar plaques in Prague.
Like the paratroopers, the two marital couples paid with their lives for having helped them.
The paratroopers went into hiding after the successful mission in several places in Prague and eventually in the Saint Cyril and Methodius Church in Prague.
Due to the betrayal of a fellow paratrooper, they were uncovered by the Nazi forces and died in the last, heroic struggle with them in the basement of the church.
The couples were then detained, sent to the concentration camp in Mauthausen and shot dead.
In retaliation for the successful mission that killed Heydrich, one of the Holocaust architects, the Nazis razed Lidice, a central Bohemian village with some 500 inhabitants, to the ground on June 10, 1942, shooting all 173 male inhabitants present, and sending women to a concentration camp and children, except for a few, to an extermination camp. A total of 340 Lidice inhabitants died.
The killing of Heydrich is considered one of the most successful acts of the Czechoslovak World War Two resistance.
pv/dr
