President urges vigilance at Lidice ceremony

Government officials, cultural figures and WWII veterans gathered at the Lidice memorial on Saturday for a commemorative ceremony marking the destruction of the village by the Nazis in 1942 in revenge for the assassination of Nazi governor Reinhard Heydrich. All the men in Lidice were shot, women transported to concentration camps, children forcibly placed in German families for re-education and the village itself was razed to the ground. Speaking at the ceremony, President Miloš Zeman warned against what he called creeping neo-Nazism and false nationalism, saying society must remain vigilant against the danger of history repeating itself.