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Wednesday 14 October 2020

The Lidice children

Among the ramblings of WWII, those committed on children are, in my opinion, the worst. Of course the Germans are the main culprits of what happened, since they not only committed them but also induced their partners, the Baltic countries, the Austrians, the Romanians, the Hungarians, etc. to carry out all kinds of atrocities. One of the German specialties was to murder entire towns, men, women and children, in Belarus and throughout the USSR thousands of towns were the victims, but as is often the case, even today, the further east the atrocities occur, the more unknown they are. The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich 
Reinhard Heydrich

In the late spring of 1942,all 173 males from the village who were over 15 years of age were executed on 10 June 1942. A further 11 men from the village but who were not present at the time, were later arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others who were already under arrest. The 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children who were considered racially suitable and thus eligible for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were gassed.


But it is not our intention to describe the horror suffered by the unhappy inhabitants of that village, for this you can see the links at the bottom of this article, but rather to follow the fate of the rare children abducted and who survived that barbarism.

Three days after the attack, Nazi officials separated the young from their mothers, assuring all that a reunion would follow relocation. The women boarded trucks bound for Ravensbrück concentration camp, and most of the children left for a camp in Łódź, Poland.

The young survivors arrived in Łódź with a message from their Nazi captors: “The children are taking with them only what they wear. No special care is to be provided.” Indeed, the only “care” given at the camp was extensive physical testing. German doctors measured the children’s facial features, identifying those with “Aryan” characteristics as candidates for Germanization  a process where suitably featured non-German children were adopted by German families.


In total, nine children met the criteria for Germanization and were sent to Puschkau, Poland, to learn German and begin the assimilation process. On July 2, the remaining 81 children arrived at Chelmno   extermination camp. Historians believe they were killed in mobile gas chambers that same day. 

By the end of the war, 340 of Lidice’s 503 residents were dead as a direct result of the June 10 massacre. 143 women and 17 children, including those born just after the attack, eventually returned to the ruins of their hometown and began the arduous task of resurrecting the community.

(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-lidice-massacre-180970242/ )

Only 17 children come back, many only speaking German because they were adopted by German families ( nazis of course ).

Lidice School
Some histories of the survivors :

Anna Hanfová, one of three siblings selected for Germanization, was one of the first lost children to return. She spent the remainder of the war living in eastern Germany but maintained limited contact with her sister Marie and cousin Emilie Frejová, and when Anna returned to Lidice, she led authorities to both relatives’ new German homes.

Otto and Freda Kuckuk, a well-to-do couple with strong SS ties, had adopted Frejová. In Witnesses to War , author Michael Leapman writes that Frejová adjusted well, but Marie’s new life was more complicated: Her adoptive family treated her like a slave and convinced her that the Czech were a subservient race. It took several years for Marie to overcome this indoctrinated belief.

Václav, the third sibling, refused to cooperate with his captors; he drifted between children’s homes and incurred brutal punishments for unruly behavior. In late 1945, Josefina Napravilova, a humanitarian who located about 40 lost Czech children during the aftermath of the war, encountered Vaclav at a displaced persons camp. He was slow to trust her but later dubbed Napravilova his “second mother.”

Elizabeth White, a historian at theUnoited States Holocaust Memorial Museum,  , explains the difficulty of the children’s rehabilitation process, as most selected for Germanization were taken from home at a young age and eventually forgot their Czech heritage.

“When [the children] were found and sent back, they didn't remember how to speak Czech,” White says. “One girl’s mother survived Ravensbrück but had tuberculosis and died four months after she came back. At first when they spoke, they had to use a translator.”

(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-lidice-massacre-180970242/)

 





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