The village of Lidice, located a few miles outside the Czechoslovak capital Prague, was the site of a paroxysm of vindictive, pitiless Nazi violence. On the night of June 9 1942, SS guards attempted to completely obliterate the village by killing or deporting its inhabitants, by eliminating every trace of humanity and even by exhuming the dead. A total of 173 inhabitants were murdered on the spot. The rest were deported to the Nazi-operated extermination camps, where the village death toll rose to approximately 340. Those who survived suffered the fate of forced dispersal . But an unlikely alliance of...