by Joan M. Wolf
"Your mama knows German, so you won't need me to translate," Marcie said.
"Yes. Good," I said. I was glad I would be alone with Mama.
"Are you ready, then?" Marcie asked, her hand on the door to the room.
I nodded, scarcely able to breathe.
"She has been in a concentration camp," Marcie said.
"Yes, yes." I couldn't hide my impatience. How much longer would I have to wait?
"You must understand her condition," she continued. "They were treated worse than animals in those camps. She will be okay in time, but right now she looks..." Her words trailed off.
"I understand," I said impatiently. I didn't care how she looked. I just wanted to see her.
"I'll be close by if you need me." Marcie opened the door, then disappeared around the corner. Mama and I were alone.
She sat in a chair, her hands clasped in her lap. Had I not known it was Mama, I might never have recognized the haggard, thin person who stared back at me. She looked like the women I had seen at the camp in the woods. Her hair was very short and ragged, with small tufts sticking out in places. Her knees were the widest part of her legs, protruding beneath her dress. Her cheeks were sunken and gray. But her eyes still shone with the light I knew as my mother's.
"Mama?" I reached a hand out to her. After three years, how could I dare hope that she was even real?
"Milada." She touched my face, pulling me to her and sobbing. I touched her with my fingers, needing to know that she was real, needing to feel every part of her: her hair, back, neck, hands, arms, shoulders. Over and over again she said my name. "Milada, Milada. My little Milada."
Long afterward, I would ask her to say my name just so I could hear it spoken out loud.
Fourteen
October 1945: Prague, Czechoslovakia
WHEN Mama was well enough, she and I left the displaced persons center and moved into a small flat in Prague with Mama's cousin.
Our family of six had become a family of two.
Mama's cousin worked as an assistant in the office of the reinstated government. Like so many others, she was trying to help restore order after Hitler's troops had left. We could stay with her for as long as we needed her home.
I began part-time classwork at a school near the apartment, attending lessons in the morning and tutoring with Mama in the afternoon. All the lessons were in Czech, making them difficult and confusing. But I didn't care. I never wanted to speak German again.
Schoolwork kept me busy during the day, but my nights were filled with the faces of Jaro and Papa and Babichka and Anechka. It was as if by dreaming about them enough, I hoped I might wake up one morning and see them standing in the small bedroom Mama and I shared. The few times I tried to talk to Mama about my dreams, she refused to listen.
"We must live in the here and now, Milada," she would say if I even brought up their names. Afterward she would go into our bedroom and shut the door, keeping it closed for hours.
Eventually I stopped speaking of them.
I kept Grandmother's pin next to me in a pocket of my skirt. I had shown it to Mama only days after being reunited with her.
"Milada," she had gasped, her eyes filling with tears. "You kept this? All this time? All these years?"
"Grandmother told me not to forget," I said, beginning to cry myself. "The night we were taken away. Remember?"
Mama nodded, grasping the pin. It was the only thing we had left from before the war.
The Czech language was coming back to me in bits and pieces. Sometimes I would remember a word or a whole phrase clearly, only to have it float out of my head hours later, just out of reach. Mama was trying to help, repeating words I pronounced incorrectly or reminding me of words I had forgotten altogether.
"Babichka," she said late one afternoon, when I had forgotten again how to say "grandmother" in Czech.
"Babichka," I repeated and looked down, suddenly swallowed by grief.
"Milada," Mama said gently, lifting my face to hers.
"I think about her all the time, Mama. And Papa and Jaro. And baby Anechka. I know you want us to live in the here and now, but I can't stop the dreams and I don't understand. I just don't understand any of it."
She wrapped an arm around me and pulled me down onto the small sofa next to her. "I don't understand either, Milada," she said, stroking my hair. "And maybe it's all right to talk. Maybe I'm ready for that now. A little."
I started talking slowly at first, then faster and faster, until the words came pouring out of me in a torrent. I talked about Elsbeth and her mother and about the center and Ruzha and little Heidi. About my discovery of the camp and the day Marcie came for me.
Mama talked too, but mostly about times long before the war. She told me about the day I was born and the day I was baptized. About her wedding day, when it had rained and rained and she and Papa had danced and laughed despite the mud. She told me about the last time she saw Babichka, who was led away because she was too old to work, and about Terezie, who was killed in Poland.
When Mama's cousin came home from work that night, she fixed us a small meal. Then she went into her bedroom and left us alone.
Mama and I talked late into the night, laughing occasionally and crying too. When we finally went to our room, I fell into bed, exhausted, and slept without dreams for the first time in months.
***
Later that fall Mama and I went to visit the place where Lidice had once stood. Hitler's troops had razed the entire town, turning houses and buildings that had once been filled with our friends and neighbors into an empty field. The field lay before us, quiet and peaceful, a betrayal of the horror that had taken place there only three years before.
Mama and I stood together on top of a hill overlooking where the town had been. We were standing at almost the exact spot where Papa and I used to go stargazing. I took Mama's hand in mine. She looked at me and touched Babichka's pin on my collar. She had asked me to take it from my pocket and wear it so everyone could see it. It helped her to remember the good parts before the war, she said, and not just the bad things that had happened during the war.
It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was just beginning to set, turning the edges of the field a soft, hazy shade of orange. Squinting, I could almost see the place where our house had once been. In the breeze I could almost hear the voices of Papa and Jaroslav and little Anechka. And I thought I could even hear the voice of Babichka telling me to remember. Remember who you are. Always.
"They did not win, you know," Mama said qui etly, looking out again over the field. "This war. Or taking you. Or Anechka..."
"I know." I looked out over the field, trying to imagine what Anechka would look like as a little girl. "They will find Anechka, Mama. They will."
She looked up at me and then out again across the field. One lonely star had appeared in the sky. I looked at it a long time before turning away.
I found my way home, Babichka, I thought. And I'll remember. Always.
Author's Note
Although Milada, Ruzha, and the other characters in these pages are fictional, this story was inspired by actual events that took place during World War ll.
By 1939, Hitler controlled the country of Czechoslovakia (now two separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia). He assigned one of his favorite officers, Reinhard Heydrich, to be the "protector" of Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was known as a particularly brutal Nazi and helped develop the "Final Solution"—the plan to exterminate all European Jews. He was nicknamed the "butcher of Prague" by the Czech people and was greatly feared and despised.
After several years of planning in England, a number of resistance fighters parachuted into Czechoslovakia to assassinate Heydrich. Their attempt, made on May 27, 1942, did not go as planned, but Heydrich did eventually die on June 4 of wounds he received during the attack.
Hitler was enraged. Not only had the Czech resistance fighters killed one of his favorite officers, but they had shown a defiance t
oward him that he would not tolerate. He immediately sought revenge.
After a brief investigation, Nazi intelligence believed they had found a tie between the Czech resistance fighters and the small town of Lidice, located approximately fifteen kilometers (ten miles) from Prague. It was later discovered that no one in Lidice had helped the assassins, but by that time it was too late. Hitler had taken his revenge.
In the very early hours of June 10, 1942, Nazi soldiers arrived in Lidice. They went from house to house, ordering residents to pack their things and leave for a three-day interrogation. The women and children were separated from the men and led to the Lidice grammar school. Their possessions were confiscated, and they were then taken to the high school in the nearby town of Kladno. As they made this journey, the Nazis assured them that they would soon be reunited with their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.
However, as the women were on their way to Kladno, the Lidice men and teenage boys were taken to the small Horak farm on the outskirts of town. In groups of ten they were lined up against mattresses propped along a wall to prevent bullets from ricocheting. Then they were shot. That night, 173 innocent men and teenage boys were killed, then haphazardly buried in a mass grave nearby.
Meanwhile, the women and children spent three agonizing days in the Kladno school gym waiting for word of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. During this time the children were inspected by Nazi doctors. Their heads were measured and their eye and hair colors were examined to see if they matched Aryan standards. Although Milada was taken away from her mother and grandmother for the examination in this story, children often were accompanied by their mothers, and the records of some of those exams were recovered after the war. Those children who were deemed "suitable" were placed in the Lebensborn (which means "wellspring of life") program, a Nazi program that included kidnapping non-Jewish, non-German children who had Aryan features and "repatriating" them as German children.
Eventually, ten Lidice children over the age of one were selected for "Germanization." The youngest went directly to orphanages for adoption by German citizens. Others went through training in Lebensborn centers, where they were given German names, were taught the German language, and received lessons according to the Nazi philosophy. Unlike tens of thousands of other children who were put through the Lebensborn program, all the Lidice children still alive at the end of the war were found and returned.
In all, seventeen of the 105 Lidice children survived the war.
Very little has been written in English about the Lebensborn centers that housed kidnapped children, part of which may be due to the fact that so few children were found after the war. So the time Milada spends in the Lebensborn center is the most fictionalized part of this book. Her experience in the center has been pieced together from interviews and articles with and about the very few Lebensborn survivors, as well as research about the education of children during the Nazi regime and the overall Nazi philosophy regarding children and race.
A few things about the Lebensborn program are known for sure. Children (particularly Polish children) were literally kidnapped off the streets by Nazis known as "brown shirts" and placed in "retraining" centers. Some children—those like Heidi in the story who were unable to function in the horrific circumstances of the Lebensborn centers—were removed and sent to concentration camps, where their fate was almost certain death. Many of the youngest Lebensborn children who were recovered after the war were unable to remember anything of their former lives and were very traumatized when removed from their adoptive German parents.
The women of Lidice were sent to the Ravens-brück concentration camp near Fürstenberg, Germany, sixty miles north of Berlin. At Ravensbrück, the Lidice prisoners wore uniforms with a red upside-down triangular patch sewn on the chest. Inside the triangle was a black T, which stood for Tschechisch, the German word for Czech. This identified them as political prisoners, as opposed to the Jewish prisoners, who were religious prisoners and had a yellow star of David sewn on their uniforms. While many prisoners died of illness at Ravensbrück, others were killed because the Nazis considered them too weak or injured to work in the camp. Their bodies were cremated at the nearby Fürstenberg crematorium until 1943, when a crematorium was built on-site at Ravensbrück, followed shortly thereafter by a gas chamber.
Eighty-eight children from Lidice who were not seen as "suitable" for the Lebensborn program were taken to Poland. There they spent several weeks in a center with hardly any food and no extra clothing. After an additional six children were selected for the Lebensborn program, the Nazis took the remaining eighty-two children to specially designed vans near Chelmno, Poland, where they were killed with poisonous gas. Of the 500 citizens of Lidice, 340 men, women, and children were killed.
To complete his mission of revenge, Hitler ordered the destruction of Lidice. Nazi troops and prisoners from the nearby Terezin ghetto (There-sienstadt) spent a year erasing any evidence that a town had once existed there. All written trace of Lidice was removed from Czech records.
Although a new town of Lidice was eventually built, the old town was left as an empty expanse in order to serve as a reminder of the emptiness of war. Today, overlooking the site of the old town, are a museum, a sacred space, and a beautiful rose garden, all meant to help us remember what happened to this small village.
***
In October 2004 I had the amazing opportunity to visit the Lidice Memorial in the Czech Republic and meet four survivors of the events of June 10, 1942. In addition, I met a man who was born shortly after the war whose mother had survived a stay in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Miloslava Suchánek-Kalibová was nineteen and her sister, Jaroslava Suchánek-Skleni010Dka, was fifteen when the Nazis came to their village that night. Both spent three years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp and came back after the war to live in the new Lidice.
Václav Zelenka was four years old at the time of the tragedy. He was taken from his mother in the Kladno gym and put into a particularly brutal Lebensborn camp. He lives in the new Lidice and serves as the current mayor.
Maru0161ka (Marie) Dole017Ealová-Supíková was ten years old when the Nazis came on the night of June 10, 1942. Although I had already written most of the story before I met Marie, I discovered that her experience had an uncanny resemblance to Milada's.
Like Milada, Maru0161ka lost her brother and father to Nazi guns, and lost her beloved grandmother in Ravensbrück. She too was adopted into a Nazi family and, like Milada, was able to keep a special piece of jewelry with her (a pair of earrings) throughout the war. Her adoptive family, like Milada's, lived relatively near Ravensbrück (although her adoptive father was not a high-ranking Nazi). Like Milada, she was unable to remember any of the Czech language when she returned. However, her mother did not speak German, and the two were unable to communicate. Tragically, her mother died several months after her return as a result of tuberculosis contracted in Ravensbrück. Maru0161ka was left orphaned and alone.
I remain amazed not only by the courage these survivors showed sixty years ago but by their continuing optimism and strength. The story of Lidice has much to teach us about humankind's incredible capacity for brutality, as well as its incredible ability to survive—and even thrive—despite horrific events.
For more information, you can visit:
www.lidice-memorial.cz.
Click on the British flag icon for the English version of this website.
Joan M. Wolf's research for this book took her to the Czech Republic, where her great-grandmother was born. During her trip, she visited the town of Lidice and met four survivors of the Nazi attack that took place there on June 10, 1942. "They graciously shared their horrific and courageous experiences with me, and I came away from that trip forever changed—both as a writer and as a person," she says.
When not writing, Joan teaches fourth grade in Minnesota. This is her first book for children.
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