The story of this place
Two weeks after Lidice, on 24 June 1942, the Nazis fell on Ležáky, a hamlet of nine houses whose quarry mill had hidden the parachutists' transmitter, code-named Libuše, that linked the Anthropoid team to London. All the adults — 33 men and women — were shot at Pardubice; the settlement was burned and razed. Of the thirteen children, eleven were murdered at Chełmno and only two, deemed suitable for Germanisation, survived. Nothing was rebuilt. On the bare, wind-swept meadow where the houses once stood, nine granite crosses now mark the vanished homesteads, and a small museum tells how an entire community was extinguished for a single hidden radio.