Terezín

Doris Schimmerlingova, a survivor of the Terezín concentration camp just an hour north of Prague, thumbs through photos of herself during her three years in the camp. She was a shepherdess, a job she was lucky to have, she says, because it spared her hard, merciless labor and let her enjoy the outdoors.

SMALL WONDER

My classmates and I took a trip to Terezín, an old military base that was used as a concentration camp and Jewish ghetto during World War II. We were accompanied by the kindhearted, humble and quick-witted Dorish Schimmerlingova, who survived Terezín during World War II. As we walked through the Ghetto Museum, Doris pointed out names written all over the museum.

“He died, and he died, and he died,” Doris said. “I knew him, but he is dead, too.”

Doris was taken from her village in Moravia when she was just 14 and placed in the Jewish ghetto of the Terezín compound, an hour north of Prague. She worked there until the end of the war, when she was 17, as a shepherdess. She said those sheep were her saving grace. If not for the “stupid but nice” animals, life in the Terezín ghetto would have been very different, Doris said.

One of her most vivid memories of her time at Terezín is of reading a book–which was strictly forbidden in the camp–while tending to her sheep, when she saw a shadow fall across her lap. She looked up to see Commandant Karl Rohm, the SS military leader who headed the entire compound, staring down at her from atop his huge black horse.

“He could have shot me right there,” Doris said. “But he didn’t. He just turned and rode off.”

Doris and her mother were separated from her brother and father during their internment. While Doris’ grandparents, mother and father were all murdered, she and her brother found their way back to each other after the war, even though they had believed the other to be dead.

When they found each other, they learned of the magnitude of Adolf Hitler’s horrors against humanity. In Terezín, Doris had not known what was happening to other Jews all over Europe. But when she learned, it broke her heart.

“It was very shocking,” Doris said, “because you always hoped someone would come.”

While Doris said it never gets easier to return to Terezín, she keeps going back because it’s important.

“I have to tell the story,” Doris said. “You have to know. And you are all very nice, so I don’t regret coming back here with you.”

The Village Hitler Razed to the Ground

A visitor looks at the pictures of the five parachutists who hid in the crypt at the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius in central Prague after two of them assassinated Hitler’s third-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich. The picture to the right of each portrait shows the dead soldier after the Nazis found them in the crypt. The first picture is that of Jan Kubis, who threw the grenade that ultimately killed Heydrich.

A THOUSAND WORDS

Half an hour northwest of Prague lies what remains of Lidice (pronounced “Li-DITZ-uh”), a small village Adolf Hitler ordered razed to the ground in June 1942. Hitler dealt out such an extreme punishment in response to the Czech assassination of his third-in-command, Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich.

Two British-trained Czech soldiers, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, opened fire on Heydrich’s car on the morning of May 27, 1942 as Heydrich’s chauffeur drove him to his office at Prague Castle. After a successful assassination attempt, the two soldiers joined their support team of parachutists in hiding at the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius in central Prague.

Punishment for such an act of treason was swift and severe. The Third Reich ordered a massive manhunt for the assassins: 21,000 men checked 36,000 houses. More than 13,000 men and women were tortured and killed for information on the soldier’s whereabouts.

One of the parachutists, who had fled the group to hide with his mother, betrayed the other soldiers’ location in the crypt to the Nazis. They all refused to surrender, so, with the exception of Kubiš, who was knocked unconscious during the six-hour gun battle with the Nazis, they all committed suicide.

While the assassins had been caught and killed, the Fuhrer was not satisfied. Based on its residents’ fabricated ties to the soldiers, Hitler ordered the small village of Lidice to be destroyed as punishment for the Czechs’ insubordination, though really, Lidice’s tragic death was mere retaliation for Heydrich’s assassination. Hitler wanted to make an example out of the village, and so his “justice” for Heydrich’s death was absolute: All men in the village were to be exterminated, all women transported to concentration camps, and all children, except those identified as suitable for Germanisation, were to be re-educated by different means. The entire village, including the trees, pets and the dead bodies in the cemetery, was to be burned down, leveled completely and wiped off the map. All the rubble was removed, the bodies buried in shallow graves off-site. Lidice existed no more.

Only 153 women and 17 children returned to what used to be Lidice after the war. Today, nothing but half a foundation of one house and the front door step of another remains of the once quiet and charming Lidice. There is a new Lidice just up the hill from the old Lidice. They rebuilt, but they have not forgotten.