Trama

Story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi SS commander, by Czech partisans and the reprisals inflicted by the Nazis on the Czechs.

Somewhat fictionalized account of the destruction of the village of Lidice in Czechia and the events leading up to it. In 1942, the Allies parachuted a Czech resistance fighter into the area. He quickly reunites with his former girlfriend and many of the villagers who knew him from before the war. The Nazis are evil however and under the command of Reinhardt Heydrich rule the country with an iron fist, arbitrarily arresting innocents and charging them with fictitious crimes. When Heydrich is severely wounded in a roadside attack - he dies three days later - Henrich Himmler orders the destruction of Lidice. The men are herded into a churchyard where they sing defiantly as they are shot down, the village is set aflame and the women are sent to concentration camps. The town itself is leveled.—garykmcd

Events in Nazi-controlled Czechia, specifically in the town of Lidice, in 1942 are dramatized. The citizens of Lidice live in constant fear as they are treated like slaves at the behest of the Nazi rulers, not so much Burgomeister Herman Bauer, a German party member who the Nazis have installed and who the citizens feels they may be able to negotiate with despite he raping the land for his own benefit, but rather sadistic SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Most of the men believe they must bide their time in obeying the orders of the Nazis, otherwise face massacre. Native son, Karel Vavra, an activist who escaped to England, is secretly parachuted back into the region in an Allied mission to organize citizens behind enemy lines to band together as resistance fighters. With the exception of Karel's girlfriend Jarmilla Hanka who he left behind, Karel and his message are not generally welcomed in the men of Lidice believing the contrary that being obedient is the path to survival, Jarmilla's father, Jan Hanka, acting as the voice of most of the townsfolk. But as one by one men are seemingly detained and/or executed for no seemingly apparent reason besides the Nazis wanting to instill fear, the questions become whether the townsfolk will reach a tipping point in not standing for those executions and will fight back, and if so what the Nazi response in turn would be.—Huggo