This bronze sculpture by Marie Uchytilová stands as a haunting reminder of the 82 children from Lidice, murdered at Chełmno in 1942 during the Nazi-led Lidice massacre. This atrocity, a ruthless reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, saw the destruction of an entire village, the execution of its men, and the deportation of its women and children.
The mass murder of these innocent children echoes the horrors we are witnessing today in Gaza, where children are subjected to relentless violence, their lives extinguished amidst a brutal conflict. The suffering of the children in Lidice mirrors the slaughter of the children in Gaza, binding their fates across time as stark symbols of the global tragedy of war and genocide.
As history is erased in the US and other countries we suffer from a paralyzing censorship that prevents us from both learning from history and recognizing the emergence of the ghosts of the past in the policies of the new barbarians committing and aiding in war crimes and genocidal slaughter.
As I write this, leading Holocaust and Genocide scholar, Omer Bartov, writes in the NY Times that over 17,000 children have been killed in Gaza, and 870 of them were less than a year old. Moreover, Gaza has the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world.
The horrors unfolding in Gaza are not just a crisis, they are a stark testament to the violence of unchecked power, the grim reality of which demands our collective moral reckoning and a mass movement to stop this machinery of death and state terrorism..
— Henry Giroux
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