On June 10, 1942, Nazi soldiers surrounded the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice. They killed the men outright–192 of them–and sent the women to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Of the 105 children in the village all but a handful were murdered; these few, with Aryan features, were reserved for adoption by Germans. The Nazis reduced the buildings to rubble and carted the rubble away. Then they set to work on the land itself, leveling old hills and forming new ones, uprooting trees in one place and planting them in another, even changing the flow of a nearby river.
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In short, they erased Lidice as conscientiously and as viciously as the Romans erased Carthage. Why? Because ten days earlier in Prague, Czech patriots had assassinated an especially murderous SS official named Reinhard Heydrich.
In the Shadow of Memory is less about the historical Lidice than the psychic one Zbiral inherited from her mother Anna and half-sister Eva, both of whom survived the Lidice atrocity and were reunited amid great nationalist fanfare on its third anniversary. Eva, who was five at the time she was ripped from her mother’s arms, has always kept her distance from the experience, claiming not to remember it. She declined Zbiral’s invitation to view the documentary as recently as last month. But Anna made the tragedy a constant household presence. In the documentary Zbiral recalls her mother scolding her for not eating her dinner: “You should be hungry. You should be as hungry as I was. You need concentration camp, that’s what you need.”
–Tony Adler
