MEMORY OR HEROISM, 67 YEARS LATER

Today, a memorial to honor a group of World War Two heroes was unveiled in Prague to honor SOE-trained Czechoslovak parachutists who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the feared Reichsprotektor of occupied Bohemia and Moravia, one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.

Operation Anthropoid bore fruit exactly 67 years ago, on May 27, 1942, when one of the teams, consisting of Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, caught Heydrich in the open and wounded him with a bomb. They managed to escape, and Heydrich succumbed to his wounds on June 04, 1942.

The reign of terror that the Nazis unleashed in Bohemia in revenge is the stuff of legend by now. Thousands were arrested, tortured and killed for either having protected the parachutists or simply for revenge. The town of Lidice was razed, its menfolk were shot, the women sent to concentration camps and the children to the Reich to be "Aryanized." Two weeks later, the same fate met the village of Ležáky. The parachutists, betrayed by Karel Čurda, one of their own, were ultimately run to ground in their hideout in the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in Prague, where, after a long battle, they committed suicide to keep from being taken captive.

It is somehow appropriate that the unveiling would take place so close to our Memorial Day, as a reminder that heroism in the face of terror knows no boundaries.