Operation Anthropoid
The war's boldest assassination — Czechs felling Bohemia's executioner.
Ludek — CC BY-SA 3.0 · VitVit — CC BY-SA 4.0 · jockrutherford from Owen Sound, ON — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Another Believer — CC BY-SA 4.0
Hitler, deranged at his possible heir's death, ordered annihilating vengeance: Lidice's men executed, women and children deported, the village literally erased from maps (Ležáky after it), five thousand killed in sweeps — the free world so shocked that American towns and newborns were named Lidice in memoriam. The historical debate stands: was the assassination worth its price? — the Czech consensus: yes, dignity has no exchange rate.
A full map for the patriotic day: the ambush curve in Libeň suburb (the modern Anthropoid monument), Bulovka hospital where Heydrich died, and Lidice itself a solemn memorial half an hour out (its statue of eighty-three children breaks the heart) — the crypt here remains the heart: begin or end with it.
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The holiest site of Czech courage: in this Baroque Orthodox cathedral's crypt the parachutists of Operation Anthropoid — killers of Reinhard Heydrich, Bohemia's executioner and the highest-ranked Holocaust architect ever assassinated — fought their last battle: on 18 June 1942 seven hundred SS besieged them for hours, and the seven fought to the last round, refusing capture. The crypt today is a national memorial preserved as it was: the ventilation slot through which soldiers tried to flood it still in its bullet-pocked wall — the exhibition telling the whole operation: training in England, the drop, the ambush, and the terrible price of vengeance (the villages of Lidice and Ležáky erased from existence). Above, the working cathedral is beautiful in its Baroque nave — the whole visit an hour you leave with head bowed: Prague's deepest experience without rival, a story beyond any film, about which films have indeed been made.
The war's boldest assassination — Czechs felling Bohemia's executioner.
The flooding was tried through it — the pocked wall as witness.
Resslova 9a, 120 00 Prague