Remembering Lidice
By Rabbi Charlie Savenor – June 30, 2016
“Are you going to Lidice?”
When Rabbi Ronald Hoffberg, a Conservative Rabbi in Prague,
asked me about Lidice just a few days ago, I had no idea what he was talking
about. Thankfully I changed my plans to visit this quaint Czech town found approximately
15 miles from Prague.
Lidice becomes known around the globe in June 1942, but its story
actually begins the instant Hitler turns Czech into a German Protectorate in
1939. The situation gets worse when Reinhard Heydrich, former head of the
Gestapo, becomes the region’s Protector in September 1941.
Known as being cruel and ruthless, Heydrich helped
conceptualize the Nazis’ death machine known as The Final Solution. That Heydrich
was being groomed by Hitler to one day succeed him may help us understand
Lidice’s fate.
On May 27, 1942, two Czech freedom fighters attempted to
assassinate Heydrich. While their mission, “Operation Anthropoid”, was not
immediately successful, this brutal Nazi leader did succumb to his wounds on
June 4, 1942.
Believed erroneously to have connections to Heydrich’s assassins, Lidice becomes “ground zero” for Hitler’s wrath. Before sunrise on June 10, 1942, the Nazis surrounded this pacific village. Over 190 men were immediately rounded up and massacred without blindfolds. Within days, nearly two hundred women were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Of
the 105 children in Lidice, those considered to look like Aryans were deemed “suitable
for Germanization” and handed over to SS families to be raised in Germany. The remaining
82 children were sent
to the Chelmno
extermination camp, where they were gassed in trucks on July 2, 1942.
While not directly connected to the
Jewish experience during the Holocaust, Lidice intersects with the larger
narrative. First, Jewish inmates of Terezin were brought in to dig the mass
graves in Lidice. Second, when Heydrich died, the Nazis named The Final
Solution after him: Operation Reinhard.
After the war Lidice would indeed be rebuilt. Some of the
widows and children returned to the new Lidice.
Next door still exists acres of open fields. In the
midst of this quiet place, there is a haunting memorial sculpture by Marie
Uchytilová that is made up of 82 bronze
life-size statues of Lidice’s children (42 girls and 40 boys) murdered at
Chelmno.
Staring at these lifelike children, I felt like Franz
Kafka who scolded his father for not sharing enough about the value of Judaism.
I wanted to ask anyone who would listen: Why we don’t talk more about Lidice?
The day we visited Lidice local kindergarten children played
joyfully a stone’s throw from this moving memorial. Their teacher smiled at my
guide and me, and explained that her young students love frolicking here. The
ironic contrast between the memorial and these sounds of life left an indelible
mark on my soul.
Since I have visited Lidice, there have been terrorist attacks
in Tel Aviv, Orlando and now Istanbul. Sadly there are new memorials to build
to victims whose lives have been extinguished swiftly like most of Lidice’s
original inhabitants.
In the words of Ben Hecht, the author of Perfidy, “I write here as a man not as a Jew; but it is from the
vantage point of Jewishness that I have noted and felt the decay of decency in
the world.”
Lidice warns us not just about the danger of unchecked evil,
but also about how easy it is to forget. Lidice shall live again when we fight
against evil no matter where it exists.
Rabbi
Charles Savenor serves as the Director of Congregational Education at the Park
Avenue Synagogue in New York.
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