Veronika Kellerová

“Grandma said that, up until then, the people in Lidice had been more or less Catholic; then there were—I don’t know exactly—maybe forty members of the Czechoslovak Church, but actually after the war, when they returned, there were very few of the women from Lidice who remained believers. As it happens, we—the ones who bought the house from Mrs. Kajmlová—well, she really did go to church every Sunday; she never gave up her faith. But because they said that they simply couldn’t understand how God could have allowed what they’d seen and what had happened to them. So they stopped believing. But here’s something interesting—imagine this: as I mentioned before, my grandmother lost her unborn baby boy, she never wanted to eat cherries until specific time. I could never understand that. It wasn’t until I was fourteen or fifteen—maybe even a little older—that I asked, “Grandma, why don’t you want those cherries, and then you eat them?” And she said, “Because when the Virgin Mary hands out cherries to the children in heaven, she says: ‘Your mother ate them.’ It’s some kind of legend that, for a certain period of time, mothers who’ve lost a child shouldn’t eat cherries, so that they don’t deprive their baby or child—who’s in heaven—of them. So even though this grandmother claimed she didn’t believe in it—and she was a member of the Communist Party—she simply followed this custom.”

“My mum told me that in Lidice, the young people fought fiercely against the invasion in ’68, of course. And right next to Lidice is the main Prague–Kladno motorway, the I-61, and they hung banners there with slogans against the invasion, against the Russian army. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but Mr. Müller, a well-known Minister of Culture [who headed the Culture Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia—editor’s note], had a relative or a wife in Lidice. And he just couldn’t stomach the fact that the youth of Lidice were behaving this way, and it looked like it was going to be a huge mess—that these young people would be expelled from secondary school, because they were all teenagers, so mostly secondary school students. And the person in charge at the time—I think it was Ms. Jarošová—basically saved them, because it could have ended very badly; it would have served as an exemplary punishment to show that the people of Lidice weren’t behaving properly.”

“I was a very curious girl, and I was interested in everything. And of course, I was interested in that history, too. I asked my grandmother—and she told me, ‘You know, I don’t really want to talk about it.’ For one thing, she blamed herself for not saving her mother, whom the Germans deported from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz, where she ended up in the gas chamber. And she really blamed herself for that her whole life. And then, when she actually returned from the concentration camp, it was customary for the women from Lidice to start visiting schools, public forums, and various factories to share their stories. My grandmother eventually got married, but for a long time she couldn’t get pregnant because she was so weakened by her time in the concentration camp. And when she finally did—and the doctor was overjoyed at the time, as my grandmother recounted—she lost that unborn baby boy. And she vowed that she simply wouldn’t dwell on it anymore—that there had been enough sorrow and tragedy in the family and in life, so she wouldn’t burden her future descendants with it.”