He was Karel Zid, a miner 27 years old. He was middling tall, with brown hair and eyes, a blunt nose and good teeth. Not much else is known about him, except that he was summarily executed for living in the wrong place.

Fifty years ago this week, Gestapo troopers lined Zid and 191 other men from the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice up against a barn wall, 10 at a time, and shot them dead.Adolf Hitler's regime had vowed to exterminate the village in revenge for the assassination of Nazi deputy Reinhard Heydrich by Czech resistance fighters who parachuted into the country from British planes.

The Nazis said they believed the assassins were aided by friends and relatives in Lidice.

Tattered identity cards in the files of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tell what little is known of Zid and three of the others who died there. They will be part of the museum's permanent exhibit after it opens next April.

The women and children of the village were sent to concentration camps. Homes and shops were dynamited, trees were cut down and a brook that ran past the village church was diverted.

A historian for the Holocaust Memorial Council said slave labor was brought in to bury all evidence of the atrocity. At the time, Berlin Radio bragged that even "the name of the community was extinguished."

But the massacre, even then, resounded through and shocked the allied world.

Edna St. Vincent Millay rushed out a poem, "The Murder of Lidice." Artist Ben Shahn did a poster for the Office of War Information showing a shackled firing squad victim.

Small towns in the United States and other countries were renamed Lidice. The first was Stern Park Gardens in Illinois. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the nation, "Instead of oblivion as the Germans had wanted, Lidice lives again." The village was subsequently renamed again, and is now Crest Hill.

After the war, the surviving women of Lidice came back and dug up remnants of the village such as signs and the identity cards. They were placed in a memorial built at the site of the destroyed town, and some were given to the Holocaust museum by the Czech government.

Historian Sybil Milton talked about them in an interview this week. Slipping on white gloves, she held up a battered piece of red metal with black lettering on it saying "Jaroslav Podhara Lidice 17."

Podhara is presumed to have died in the massacre. The scrap is thought to have been part of his business sign. But to this day, nothing about Podhara is certain. "After we have asked further questions, we will discover what Yaroslav Podhara did in the way of a business at Lidice 17," she said. "This is all there is. We don't know very much."

She said it has been established that the four men whose identity cards the museum has were indeed among those killed by the Gestapo.

Raye Farr, director of the permanent exhibition for the museum, said the Lidice exhibit will be one of the last that visitors will see before they leave.

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"The reason we felt it was so crucial is that we can convey the Nazi policy of collective responsibility, that for the assassination of a Nazi any number of people could be held responsible," said Farr.

"We also hope our exhibition will raise questions in visitors' minds: Why didn't some one do something? Why didn't people stop them? Hundreds of people paid with their lives who had nothing whatever to do with the assassination."

The museum has also collected photographs from Nazi archives, now crudely mounted on cardboard sheets, showing the destruction of the village and the bodies of the dead.

"They were very good at documenting their own deeds of destruction," noted Milton.

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