Nazis and the immigrant dream: Lidice, August 2017

I thank my uncle, Bob Haisman, for permission to use his family’s story.

In Prague, the Czech capital, we found another of those great “free” (tips only) walking tours. Our guide recapped the sad story of Czechoslovakia in the Second World War. It started a year before war broke out, when, in the notorious “appeasement at Munich,” Britain and France gave the go-ahead for Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia (the made-up country comprising ancient Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia). True to form, he later took all of it. The German invasion led to the installation of Reinhard “The Butcher” Heydrich, whom even Hitler admired for his exceptional cruelty, as the man in charge of occupied Czechoslovakia.

Czechs assassinated Heydrich in 1942. But that is not the end of the story.

What happened next was not part of our Prague guide’s story. I know about it because of my uncle, who suggested we visit the village of Lidice, 22 km from Prague. Or rather, where the village used to be.

Hitler ordered that in revenge for Heydrich’s assassination, “Lidice will die.” It’s not clear why Lidice—the village was blamed for resisting and having connections with the assassins, who were trained in and parachuted in from Britain, but I haven’t read any evidence of this. Maybe it could have been any village in Bohemia, but it was this one, from which my uncle’s grandmother, Bessie, had emigrated before the First World War.

This is what happened in Lidice on the 10th of June 1942: Every man in the village was taken out and shot. “Men” included an 85-year-old, the priest, and any boy who was at least 15 years old. A couple of boys turned 15 later and the Nazis went back and shot them too.

Horák family farm, site of the execution of men and boys

Every woman in the village was sent to a concentration camp. The children were forcibly taken from their mothers and sent away. Most were gassed at Chelmno, some sent to Poland without anything but the clothes they were wearing. Some were forcibly Germanized and, if they survived the war, had forgotten Czech and their native country.

The Nazis killed every living thing—animals too. They chopped down the trees. They burned down the buildings, and blew up anything that was left. Then they dug up the graveyard and desecrated the remains of generations before.

At the end of the war 153 women and 17 children were all who returned to Lidice. Most of the children, and every man of the village, had been killed.

We took a bus to Lidice, or rather, to what was built after 1942. The area that was the village—dating back to the fourteenth century—is still empty. Empty, that is, except for a few stone ruins,

Memorial to the children of Lidice

and memorials. There’s a museum with pictures of what the old village looked like, pictures of the dead, documentation of what the Nazis did there. You can watch film of survivors. One woman, who’d been taken away by Germans, came back at the end of the war unable to communicate with her Czech-speaking mother, who died soon after. 

They still cry about what they can remember.

I can hardly imagine an uglier thing happening, yet it’s a beautiful memorial. It was a beautiful day. We walked through the meadow between the new village and the footprint of the old one; there were wildflowers and butterflies. I thought, Peasant children hundreds of years ago must have played in this meadow.

And I thought about Bessie.

Bessie was my uncle’s Grandma. That’s what he always called her, although biologically, she was actually his aunt. You see, she and her parents and brothers left Bohemia (then under the thumb of the German Kaiser) just before the First World War, as the family was afraid their sons would be called up. They knew a European war was coming and they didn’t want their children to die.

That’s not the end of the story, either. We’ve heard about Ellis Island and the American dream of immigrants who came through there; well, Bessie and her family really did. They ended up in Chicago because of some relative. Several U.S.-born children later, Bessie’s mother died, and her father, unable to cope with a combination of guilt feelings and alcohol, did not long outlive her. 

Suddenly Bessie, 15 years old, was responsible for seven children. Including the youngest—my uncle’s mother, Millie—whom she’d promised her dying mother to raise as her own daughter.

So add the stigma of “unwed teenage mother,” even though she wasn’t. In the winter of 1917, with her brother fighting in the American army back in Europe, Bessie went out with the children looking for a job. She found one with Western Electric, assembling telephones. The company offered child care. What a crazy socialist scheme!

Bessie worked while the youngest children were taken care of. Her English was nonexistent but thanks to her employer, she studied after work. She met and married a young Czech-American man, improved her English, and they raised the family together. Until Millie’s graduation from high school, she was never told that her mother and father were actually her older sister and her brother-in-law.

Bessie and her husband were my uncle’s grandparents. That’s how he always knew them. The family stories came from a diary Bessie kept, in Czech, translated orally by Millie. 

Memorial where the men and boys of Lidice were killed

The family were Americans now, but still couldn’t stay out of European wars. Those sons did fight in both the First World War and the Second, and became casualties, but on the American side. (Anyone who doubts the reality of acquired citizenship should take that in: Leaving your home country and going to fight in a world war, on behalf of your new country.)

Bessie made my uncle promise that someday, he would take her back to Lidice, the village where she was born and had such happy memories. Not an easy promise to make. Not only had Lidice been destroyed, but Czechoslovakia was no sooner liberated from the Nazis than Soviets took it over. If the Germans were bad, thought the family, the Russians were even worse!

Still, he promised. And in 1968 the “Prague Spring” happened. Czechoslovakia seemed to be opening up, for a communist state. My uncle graduated from college. He and his grandmother would go back and visit the homeland together.

But that trip never happened. On the 21st of August—exactly 49 years before our visit to Prague—Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, and the Prague Spring reforms were extinguished by force. All travel was canceled. The family was relieved. They feared the Soviets would never let Grandma return to America.

Grandma—Bessie—passed away in her sleep later that year. It was only afterwards that my uncle was finally able to come back and visit Lidice, for her. And it is his story that made us visit it, for him.

If Bessie and her family had not emigrated; if they had still lived in Lidice in 1942, as generations had before them…

Site of the original village of Lidice

I did not think I would ever live to see a day when “Nazis are bad” could provoke an argument. In the U.S.A. of all places. I have studied this history for most of my life and I know many people have not, but I can hardly imagine this state of ignorance. I would like to take each and every ignorant person and make them stand in Lidice and watch these films. Yet I wouldn’t want them in this place, because they would desecrate it. They can’t tell false from true and have no understanding.

I have no capacity left to wonder, as I so often have, what could make people—dozens if not hundreds of occupiers—destroy so much life in such a wanton way. I no longer care about the Nazis or their motivations. In a world where people have done such terrible things to other people (and animals and the trees in the field), I do not understand how any of us can be mean.

If you have trouble dealing with the meanness and ugliness in the country where you live, try thinking about an immigrant who has made it there. Like Dr. Barnett “Bob” Stross, a Pole of Jewish origin whose family settled in England. When he heard Hitler’s sentence “Lidice will die,” he started the campaign “Lidice shall live” in Stoke-on-Trent, where he was practicing medicine. It is thanks to the people of Stoke-on-Trent that the new village of Lidice and, ultimately, the largest rose garden in Europe were built. We are not talking about well-off people, but miners and pottery workers who donated their wages in the middle of the hardship of World War II. 

Art from the international children's art competition

Or think about Bessie. A peasant girl with superstitions who grew up to be an immigrant woman. Working hard, raising a family, learning a new language, becoming a new nationality. In a couple of generations her grandson was president of the Illinois Education Association. It used to be called the American dream.

Lidice Gallery

We get to write our own ending to this story.

Drawn by a U.S. child