Marie Uchytilová

In the late 1960s, on her own initiative, Uchytilová and her husband, Jiří V. Hampl, began working on a Memorial to the Children of Lidice, a Czech village destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. The memorial depicts 82 children killed in the extermination camp in the Polish town of Chełmno. Uchytilová decided not to portray the actual children of the town because she intended to commemorate all children who had become victims of the war. When Uchytilová died in 1989—the day before the 17 November Velvet Revolution—her work remained unrealized. In the 1990s, the Danish city of Albertslund and other—mostly foreign—investors donated money to cast the sculpture in bronze. The first thirty statues were installed in Lidice in 1995, and the last were dedicated on 10 June 2000, thirty years after Uchytilová began her work and eleven years after her death. The sculptures of the children overlook the mass graves at Lidice. In 2013, the Czech President Miloš Zeman called it "the most beautiful and saddest memorial I've ever seen," and he conferred on Uchytilová a posthumous award. • Illustration — Lidice memorial (detail)