Background
Uchytilová was born in Kralovice, into a family of a clerk.
Uchytilová was born in Kralovice, into a family of a clerk.
During 1945 and 1950 she studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, under Otakar Španiel.
She created the and designed the Czechoslovak one crown coin, which was in circulation from 1957 to 1993. She died in Prague.
In the late 1960s, she began working on the monumental, a Czechoslovakian village burned out by Nazis during the World World War World War II The memorial depicts 82 children killed in the extermination camp in the Polish town of Chełmno. She deliberately decided not to create faithful portraits of the children, she intended it to be a monument to all child victims of war horrors.
She died in 1989 and her work remained unrealized up to the mid-1990s, when the Danish city of Albertslund and other—mostly foreign—investors donated the amount of money needed to cast the sculpture in bronze.
The first thirty statues were installed in Lidice in 1995, the last were revealed on 10 June 2000, thirty years after the beginning of her work and eleven years after the death of the creator. In 2013, the Czechoslovakian President Miloš Zeman called it "the most beautiful and saddest memorial I"ve ever seen" and decided to give the sculptor a state award in memoriam.