The Ministry of Culture is looking for a new director of the Lidice Memorial

Lidice - The Ministry of Culture is looking for a new director of the Lidice Memorial, having announced a competition today. The current director, Milouš Červencl, is retiring. The memorial's attendance has been increasing in recent years, surpassing 46,000 visitors last year, about a quarter of whom were foreigners. "This year we expect record attendance," Červencl told ČTK today. He did not comment on his decision to leave and does not plan any further external collaboration with the memorial.

The mission of the memorial is to commemorate the victims of the Nazi attack on the village in 1942, which resulted in the death of 340 out of more than 500 Lidice residents. The memorial was established in 1962 and includes a museum, as well as a gallery in the center of the village, featuring the Lidice Collection exhibition, hosting exhibitions including the International Children's Art Exhibition Lidice and other cultural events. This state organization is also responsible for caring for the memorial sites in Ležáky and Lety, which also commemorate the atrocities of Nazism.

A new exhibition of the memorial, showcasing the original post-war Lidice household including furnishings, will open in the spring of next year.

Sixty-five-year-old Červencl has led the memorial since 2005, after succeeding in the competition. He is also the recipient of the Golden Heart for Europe award given by the Circle of Friends of Czech-German Understanding. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Charles University, worked as an economist in several companies, and led the company Centrotex for nine years, which went bankrupt in 2000.

The memorial has also been dealing with the co-authorship case of the sculpture of the murdered Lidice children for several years; sculptor Jiří Hampl sued the institution because in 2008 the plaque at the memorial was changed without his permission, removing his name as co-author. According to the final ruling of the Prague High Court, Hampl created the sculpture together with his wife, Marie Uchytilová. Memorial representative František Vyskočil stated that he would recommend filing a petition to the Supreme Court. "I, as a statutory representative, am saying no for now," added Červencl. According to him, the memorial is now waiting for a resolution and will proceed accordingly. "This means we will remove the plaque and return the original," the director added.

The Nazis burned Lidice on June 10, 1942. The reason was the supposed connection of one of the Lidice residents with the assassination of the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. In Lidice, 173 men were shot, women were interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and children, except for a few, were killed by the Nazis with gas in the extermination camp. After the end of the war, 143 Lidice women and 17 children returned to their homeland.