LIDICE
This small town, ten kilometres west of Prague, was the scene of one of the second world war’s worst atrocities, on June 10th 1942. A few days earlier, the head Nazi in the German occupation of the Czech lands, Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated by two freedom fighters, who made good their escape, temporarily. All available German forces, army and police, were mustered to hunt down the fugitives and exact reprisals. The hunt was successful, and the two men were summarily executed, as too were other people connected, even indirectly, to their escape. But that was not enough to satisfy the Germans’ hunger for revenge, or their wish to inflict exemplary punishment on a large scale, to discourage others from acts of resistance. Accordingly, they descended on Lidice, which had an alleged connection with the assassins, and wreaked vengeance on the entire community: all the men were rounded up and shot by firing-squad; all the women were sent to concentration camps, from which few ever returned; the children were removed to Germany and given to childless couples wishing to adopt; and the buildings were razed to the ground.
After the war, the site was reverently grassed over and immaculately tended. At the centre of the site is a small rise in the ground, and at its crest is a simple memorial: a tall iron shaft, bearing a wrought-iron crown of thorns. The place has an extraordinary air of loneliness and inextinguishable sorrow.
Germans are obsessive keepers of detailed records, and through surviving records it was possible to trace the children of Lidice. They had now been with their adoptive families for over three years, spoke only German, and had come to think of where they were as home. The question arose of whether they should be uprooted once again and returned to a Czechoslovakia they no longer remembered, to a language they had long forgotten. Senior Red Cross officials decided, with some misgivings, that in the best interests of the children they should be kept where they were. But a young American social worker demurred. “Let me take the children for two weeks to a holiday camp,” he said. “If there’s nothing Czech left in them, they should stay in Germany. But I have a hunch they may surprise us.” He was right: in two weeks the children were all chattering away in Czech, and were filled with homesickness. So they were all sent back, to be raised by relatives glad to take them in. This, inevitably, was a grief to the foster-parents who had adopted them and come to love them. But the resentment against Hitler’s Germany was so great that no one was much bothered over a few broken hearts there. It is the way of the world, always: an atrocity is committed, and somebody has to pay.
FOOTNOTE
The young American Red Cross worker who played such a crucial role in re-integrating Lidice children into their homeland is rightly credited for what he did. But much later another humanitarian came to light, in the nineteen-nineties, who had also worked for the Red Gross and played a similar but more wide-ranging role.
Josefina Napravilová, a Czech woman living in Prague in 1945, joined the uprising there which expelled the Nazis as the war was ending. In the immediate postwar chaos, refugees flowed into Central Europe. Many of them found their way to a displaced persons camp in Salzburg. Napravilová was there, hoping to find among them any of the children who had been deported to Germany by the Nazis. One of them, an eleven-year-old named Václav Hanf, was from Lidice. She took him home, where he was reunited with relatives near that now demolished town.
The experience changed her life. She made it her mission, for the next two years, to crisscross Europe in search of similar young deportees needing repatriation. Tireless, and usefully multilingual, she found several dozen and arranged for their return. It was a crusade, but she waged it in a most self-effacing way. Indeed, the real extent of her achievement only became known late in her life, when freedom of information was restored to Czechoslovakia, in 1989, by the Velvet Revolution, which ousted the forty-one-year-old Communist regime.
Just before that regime seized power, she and her husband moved to Vienna; and a year later, after her husband died of a heart attack, she emigrated to Canada, supporting herself in Vancouver as a bank-teller, to begin with, and later on as a tax-auditor within the bank. Year after year, she helped émigrés integrate happily into Canada, especially in 1956 when Hungarians came, after the Soviet suppression of the Budapest uprising, and in 1968 when Czechs and Slovaks came, after the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring.
Briefly she returned to Prague, in 1989, to support the student leaders of the Velvet Revolution in many practical ways. But only later, when Czechoslovakia (as it then was) resumed a more settled and normal way of life, only then did she move back, to spend her last years in her former homeland. That was in 1994, when she was eighty.
It was while she was there, then, that Václav Hanf, now aged sixty, came back into her life. She saw an article he’d written about her, imbued with gratitude for her rescue of him as a little boy — he called her his “second mother”. She contacted him, and they became fast friends for the rest of her life.
During her final years, everything came to light that she had done for so many young people from 1945 to 1947. Very properly, she was much honoured for it; and she was eventually prevailed upon to write a short memoir when she was ninety-nine. Few lives have so convincingly come full circle.
Josefina Napravilová was born in Plzen in 1914. She died in Tabor, near Prague, in 2014, a month after her hundredth birthday.
