Lidice, Remembered
Interviewing survivors has nothing to do with interviewing.
You enter the room, make eye contact, introduce yourself, sit down, and listen. You hold open an invisible space, and invite memory to walk down its own lane. The survivors journey back, and you watch time bend as the past comes forward to meet them. If you are observant enough, you witness the landscapes begin to fill the room, and you see the survivors’ eyes look into the eyes of their parents, sisters, brothers, and neighbors. The ghosts march in, and the atmosphere becomes alive with the memories of the living who are dead now.
That’s why it’s not just an interview. In agreeing to sit with you, the survivors step boldly into the ring of trauma from days gone by, days that come alive again and again. They confront memories: a flesh-and-blood Nazi, their own bloodcurdling shock and terror, the itch of the fleas scurrying along the surface of their skin, the sharpness of shears as their hair is shorn from head to toe, the sound of the guard dogs snarling, the crack of the whip, the thud of the body collapsing next to them on the appellplatz.
For most of us, the Nazis are vile but vague — a seething mass of soulless people with guns, ovens, jackboots, and swastikas. For survivors like Miloslava and Jaroslava, the Nazis are vile, and very, very real. The sisters survived the massacre at Lidice and the horrors of Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women in Germany. Mila and Jara, as their family and friends call them, know all too well that the female guards at Ravensbrück were as vicious as the male guards. They survived under the fist of these women and the constant threat of death. At Ravensbrück, the guards didn’t have guns. Himmler, the head of all the camps, believed women were more frightened by dogs than guns, so the guards had trained attack dogs at their sides. The SS didn’t build guard towers around the perimeter of the camp walls. Instead, they let the dogs roam the camp freely at night, believing that the women would not attempt to escape under the watchful eyes of dogs that had been trained to maul and kill.
But it was a Nazi gun that killed Mila and Jara’s father. His body was pierced by a bullet, and his life was over, and he was reduced to a corpse pushed into a mass grave with the 172 other men the Nazis murdered in cold blood, in the middle of the night, in a vibrant village, in the beating heart of Czechoslovakia.
copyright Erin Faith Allen
Lidice was situated outside of Prague until June 10, 1942. That’s when the Nazis rolled through town armed with a taste for revenge and orders from the top: wipe Lidice off the map.
In response to the assassination of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and erroneous intelligence, the men of Lidice were rounded up, brought to the grounds of Horák’s farm, and shot on the spot. The women were taken to Ravensbrück, and the children were gassed at Chelmno, with the exception of the handful taken for adoption into German families. The village itself was destroyed — blown up by explosives — and every bit of it was dismantled.
Today Lidice is a rolling sea of green grass. There is a portion of the cellar to mark where Horák’s farm once was, the skeletons of the men, a statue from what was a church, and a brook. A couple hundred feet away from the remains of the cellar and the men, smack between their grave and the statue marking the place where the church used to sit, ripples the same shallow stream that had babbled sweetly through the town back then. It’s hard to imagine the purity of it, just rippling along on a night like June 10, as it lit up with reflections of hellfire, burbling beneath the choking smoke of gunpowder.
copyright Erin Faith Allen
Jaroslav, the sisters’ father, had crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. I know this because in all the photographs I see, he is smiling. In my imagination, he laughs jovially, too. The sisters have an incredible collection of photos of their life before the Nazis, all held together on black pages in a photo album that Mila flips through as we talk. The originals went up in flames, but because Jaroslav and his wife, Anna, had sent a steady flurry of photographs to his mother over the years, the sisters have a complete set of duplicates which serve as black-and-white frozen-in-time capsules of the sisters’ smiles in happier times. I feel nothing short of awe and sorrow as I witness the same smiles, now framed by soft wrinkles on faces that have faced so much, and absorb the impalpable palpability of their memories. This intersection of now and then is sacred.
Mila is returning back to the textile factory that squats beneath the walled perimeter of Ravensbrück, where her young fingers worked as nimbly and quickly as possible; speed and adeptness were her only hope to be spared the brutal beatings that punctuated the perpetual hum of the machinery. Jara is returning to the long walk home from Ravensbrück to Czechoslovakia, when she finally discovered the reason the women from Lidice had been imprisoned in Ravensbrück those three years. Embedded in this shock of surviving and her own homecoming was the blow that her father had been executed, that Lidice had been destroyed, and that the sisters had nothing except their mother left. Life was to begin again, after all of that death.
When you interview survivors, you open with a singular question: What do you remember?
And then you listen, watch, and feel.
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An excerpt from my book The In Between.