Merely two weeks following the disaster which befell the citizens of Lidice, the Chicago Sun magazine had an idea. It approached the Czechoslovak community living in a federal housing project on the outskirts of Joliet. Officials of the estate agreed to change its name to “Lidice” so that Adolf Hitler’s announced intent of erasing the community off the map would not come to pass.
Tag: stern park
Wendell Willkie – Renaming Stern Park Gardens-Lidice – July 1942
“They came in the night, men in boots and brown shirts, and they took from their homes the bewildered miners and farmers, the tailor and the priest, the boy of 17 and the old man of 70, more than 200 in all, and they shot them, because they could think of no other way to…