Lidice

A tale of two villages

I first became interested in Lidice in the 1990s when I interviewed Anna Nešporová, who had survived the destruction of the village by the Nazis in 1942. She was one of the strongest people I have ever met and the impressions of that first meeting have always stayed with me. Since then I have returned to Lidice many times as I have tried to understand more of the complex legacy of the massacre.

In June 1942, at the height of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, the village of Lidice was wiped out. All the men were shot, the women were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and the children were murdered in gas trucks. A few children were spared, those who were considered “suitable” for adoption. No building in the village survived.

The Nazis made no secret of the atrocity and trumpeted the details of the massacre to the world. Since then, Lidice has become a symbol of German brutality during the war, but as such it has also been interpreted and reinterpreted, as times have changed and regimes have come and gone.

A link between Lidice and Wales

The Lidice massacre was the impulse for a brilliant British propaganda film, The Silent Village, made between 1942 and 1943 by Humphrey Jennings, in the Welsh village of Cwmgiedd. In 1999 I made a radio documentary A Tale of Two Villages (Prix Bohemia, 2001) about the connection that continues to bind the two villages. You can listen to it here:

The Silent Village was also the subject of the documentary film Druhý život Lidic (The Second Life of Lidice), which I made for Czech Television with Pavel Štingl in 2001. I wrote about my experiences of making these two documentaries in the essay A Foreign Country published in the book Place by Thames and Hudson in 2005.

Anna Nešporová

Anna Nešporová features prominently both these documentaries. She was a person who had inspired me from the day I first met her in 1998, when she had stood for several hours to tell me details of her life, a story that she had repeated many times, but that she felt had to be told again and again. Later I got to know her family well, and I tried to capture something of her spirit in an article celebrating her life following her death at 86 in September 2006.

And here is a short radio documentary from 2002 about Anna’s brother, Josef Horák, who flew in the RAF during WWII, and his English wife Win:

Jaroslava Skleničková: If I had been a boy I would have been shot

Jaroslava Skleničková in May 2024

I have also had the privilege of getting to know Jaroslava Skleničková, who was just a few weeks past her sixteenth birthday at the time of the Lidice massacre. She has written a vivid account of her life, starting with memories of a happy childhood that was brought to an abrupt end by the events of June 1942 in Lidice. She describes the time she spent in the concentration camp at Ravensbrück and the people she came to know. Movingly, she also writes of the years that followed, as she struggled to rebuild her life. The book has been published in English as If I Had Been a Boy I Would Have Been Shot translated by Lucy Doležalová and Tamara Volejníková.

I worked with Radio Prague, the British Embassy in Prague and the Lidice Memorial to put together an audio version of the book, read by Veronika Hyks.

Here it is:

Veronika Hyks

Other links

The prominence of Lidice in the public awareness has meant that it has inspired many writers around the world. In The Literary Legacy of Lidice I look at some of their work.

Josefina Napravilová is an unsung hero, who worked to find children and bring children home after the war.

Josefina Napravilová in Lidice, January 2009