A survivor of the Lidice massacre shows Fiorello LaGuardia an album of photographs depicting the Nazi atrocity of June 1942, during an official visit by the UNRRA director to Lidice.
Overview
- Caption
- A survivor of the Lidice massacre shows Fiorello LaGuardia an album of photographs depicting the Nazi atrocity of June 1942, during an official visit by the UNRRA director to Lidice.
Also pictured is Laurence Steinhardt, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia (next to LaGuardia smoking a pipe), and Vaclav Majer, Czech minister of Food (to the right of LaGuardia). - Date
-
August 1946
- Locale
- Lidice, [Bohemia] Czechoslovakia
- Variant Locale
- Czech Republic
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of United Nations Archives and Records Management Section
- Event History
- Lidice is a village in Bohemia, 16 km from Prague, that was destroyed by the Germans in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, acting governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia since September 1941. Lidice was only one of 5,000 towns and villages that were raided by the Germans following the death of Heydrich on June 4, 1942, resulting in the arrest of over 3,000 persons. Early in the morning of June 10, 1942 all the inhabitants of Lidice were forced out of their homes. All 192 men in the village were killed, as were 71 of the women. The remaining 198 women were sent to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. 143 of these women survived the war and returned to Lidice. 98 village children were placed in "educational institutions," only 16 of whom survived. Following the removal of its population, the village of Lidice was razed in the presence of Karl Hermann Frank, secretary of state for the Protectorate and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich's successor as governor. The official reason given for the destruction of Lidice was that its villagers had helped the assassins. In addition to Operation Lidice, which was the brainchild of Prague security police chief Josef Boehme, was a revenge operation ordered by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in which 252 persons who were relatives or friends of Lidice residents were killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp on October 24, 1942. The victims included 130 women and a large number of youth. Lidice was rebuilt after the war and became a symbol both of the Nazi terror and the heroism of the Czech resistance.
[Source: Gutman, Israel. "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust." MacMillan, 1990.]
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008221.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United Nations Archives and Records Management Section
Copyright: Public DomainSource Record ID: 2574 - Restriction
- NOT FOR RELEASE without the permission of the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section
Keywords & Subjects
- Keyword
- AMBASSADORS/DIPLOMATS/ENVOYS AMERICANS ATROCITIES (LIDICE) CLOSE-UPS CZECHS GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS GROUP PORTRAITS LAGUARDIA, FIORELLO OFFICIAL VISITS STEINHARDT, LAURENCE SURVIVORS UNRRA (UN RELIEF AND REHABILITATION ADMIN) WOMEN
- Photo Designation
-
LIBERATION -- Czechoslovakia -- Official Visits/Inspections
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Fiorello Henry LaGuardia (1882-1947), U.S. Republican Congressman from New York, three term mayor of New York City and Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). LaGuardia was born December 11, 1882, in New York City. He was the third and youngest child of Achille Luigi LaGuardia, an Italian Catholic, and Irene Luzzato Coen, a Jew from Trieste. His parents had immigrated to the U.S. only two years before his birth. In 1883 LaGuardia's father joined the U.S. Army, and the family was sent to remote outposts in South Dakota and Arizona. After graduating high school in Prescott, Arizona, LaGuardia, an outstanding linguist, joined the American consular corps in 1900. He served overseas in Budapest, Trieste, and Fiume before returning to the U.S. and settling in New York City in 1906. For the next few years LaGuardia worked for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Children and the U.S. Immigration Service while attending New York University Law School. Upon his graduation in 1910, he opened up a small practice that provided much needed legal assistance to immigrant workers in the garment industry and won him many friends in lower Manhattan. By 1914 LaGuardia had become involved in Republican politics. Utilizing his command of five languages (including Yiddish), LaGuardia won the 1916 election campaign for Congress from the 14th district (Lower East Side of Manhattan), the first Italian-American to be elected to Congress. During World War I LaGuardia served in the U.S. Air Service on the Italian-Austrian front. Soon after his return to New York LaGuardia married Thea Almerigotti on March 8, 1919. Tragically, two years later she succumbed to tuberculosis. In 1922 LaGuardia ran successfully for a second congressional term, this time representing the 20th district in upper Manhattan. He continued to serve in this capacity for the next 10 years. During this period he was married again, this time to Marie Fisher. Defeated for re-election in 1932, LaGuardia made a successful bid for mayor of New York City the following year. In addition to his many contributions to the city's infrastructure and quality of life during his three terms of office, LaGuardia made a name for himself as an outspoken opponent of Nazism. His harsh criticism won him the opprobrium of the new Nazi regime, which frequently targeted him in its propaganda. In 1941 Roosevelt named LaGuardia director of the Office of Civilian Defense. In this capacity he was responsible for the creation of a national rationing program, as well as for the preparation of cities against air attacks. Much to his disappointment, this appointment did not lead to a higher-ranking government or military position. After LaGuardia declined to run for a fourth term as mayor, he was tapped to become Director General of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1946. In this role he supervised the supply of food, clothing and shelter to the millions of European displaced persons after the war. At the end of that year LaGuardia was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he died on September 20, 1947.
[Source: American Jewish Historical Society, "Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947)." Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israel Cooperative Enterprise. n.d.
Laurence Adolf Steinhardt (1892-1950), American Jewish attorney and diplomat, who as ambassador to Turkey in 1944, worked with War Refugee Board representative, Ira Hirschmann, to facilitate the rescue of Jews from the Balkans and Hungary. Born and educated in New York City, Steinhardt was admitted to the bar in 1916. After serving in the U.S. Army in 1917, he became active for a time in the Federation of American Zionists and the American Zion Commonwealth. Steinhardt launched his legal career in the prestigious law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer and Marshall, where his uncle Samuel Untermyer was a partner. While practicing law there from 1920 through 1933, he also wrote articles on such topics as medical jurisprudence, labor unions, and economics. In 1932, Steinhardt worked on Franklin Roosevelt's presidential campaign and the following year the new president appointed him minister to Sweden. This marked the beginning of his diplomatic career. Following his four years in Sweden (1933-1937), Steinhardt served as ambassador to Peru (1937-1939), the Soviet Union (1939-1941), Turkey (1942-1945), Czechoslovakia (1945-1948) and Canada (1948-1950). During his tenure as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Steinhardt lent his influence to the enforcement of the stringent American restrictions on refugee entry which hindered Jewish immigration from eastern Europe to the United States. In a cable he sent from Moscow on October 6, 1940, he alerted Washington that 2000 Japanese transit visas had recently been issued in Kaunas for transit en route to Dutch possessions in the Americas with concern that the real intention of visa recipients was to enter the US and remain there for at least the duration of the war. Steinhardt's actions in this vein were exposed by journalist I.F. Stone in a 1943 article in PM magazine which received widespread attention in the Jewish press. However, as ambassador to Turkey in 1944, Steinhardt worked vigorously, in cooperation with Ira Hirschmann of the War Refugee Board, the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the American Joint Distribution Committee, to convince the Turkish government to permit entry and passage through Turkey for European Jewish refugees seeking to escape from the Balkans and Hungary to Palestine, thus saving the lives of thousands of Jews.
[Sources: Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews, Pantheon, New York, 1984, pp.217-240; Encyclopedia Judaica, 15:368]
- Record last modified:
- 2004-04-09 00:00:00
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