A massacre similar to to the one in Lidice was repeated in the village of Ležáky on July 24, 1942. With a population of about fifty, seventeen men and fourteen women were executed and fourteen children taken to Prague to be adopted out to Nazi families. Only two of the fourteen children survived the war. The village of Ležáky was never rebuilt but crosses were put up where the houses once stood. On May 5, 1945, the village of Javoricko experienced the wrath of the Nazi occupiers. Attacked by an SS unit, thirty-eight men of the village were murdered, allegedly for co-operating with partisans, the whole village was then burned to the ground. The only buildings left standing were the school and the chapel. The victims were all buried in a common grave over which a memorial has since been erected.
In retaliation for the 213,000 of its citizens murdered during the Nazi occupation, the Czechs lost no time in squaring the account.
In May, 1945, the native German population was just over three million. Eduard Benes returned from exile in London and in Prague set up a new government which established a brutal campaign of expulsions against the German minority. Thousands of Sudeten Germans were rounded up and interned in camps without proper sanitation facilities. Soon, the camps were swarming with vermin. Hunger and disease were on a par with Belsen.
