Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [147]
Jack knocked on the door. He had phoned ahead so that Eliška would expect him, and she answered the door herself. She was as he had imagined her on the telephone, frail and walking with a cane, but she had a bright and determined look in her eyes. She had to be in her late eighties, perhaps ninety. Her English was passable.
“You look just like Joseph,” she said.
“I’ve heard that from others,” Jack said, and he appreciated hearing it again.
Eliška apologized for being out of coffee, but Jack wanted to get to the spot anyway. He helped her on with her coat, and Andie gave her the front seat of their little rental car. It was a short ride to the site of the original village—now a memorial.
Mention of Lidice in Grandpa’s will had naturally prompted Jack to research it. It was the same piece of history that Grandpa Swyteck had shared with Andie in one of the last lucid moments in his life, while Jack was in London. Andie hadn’t told him until after the funeral, and Jack was moved to hear that his grandfather’s words had come back to her in the depths of her own torture, maybe even helped her survive at a time when every second mattered. It made the trip as important to her as it was to Jack.
They both knew the horrific story, but Jack let Eliška tell it in the voice of someone who had been there.
“After Nazis invade our country,” she said, her English less than perfect, “the Reich Protector of Bohemia was SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Second in command to Himmler in the SS branch responsible for the Final Solution.”
“A worthy target for assassination,” said Jack.
“Yes,” said Eliška. “The resistance thought same. They organized in London and pulled it off. Then the nightmare comes. Nazis search everywhere for assassins. Finally, Berlin say the assassins were aided by two families in Lidice.” Eliška paused, and her gaze drifted toward the passenger’s-side window, toward the snow-covered acres of the memorial. “The punishment was decided by Adolf Hitler himself.”
She stopped and breathed deeply, and Jack wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue or not. When she seemed ready, Jack came around to help Eliška out of the car.
Theirs was the only vehicle in the parking lot. The snow had stopped falling, but the surrounding hills were covered with a fresh white blanket. Eliška walked to the far end of the lot. With Andie at his side, Jack guided Eliška by the arm, but he let her take the last few steps on her own, sensing that she wanted to be alone for a moment. She stopped in front of a large bronze memorial. It was covered with snow, and in the late-afternoon shadows Jack couldn’t tell exactly what it was from this distance. But in the cold breeze, he could almost feel the history.
Eliška continued in an old voice that shook.
“Nine June, 1942,” she said. “Close to midnight. Nazis close all roads to Lidice. No way in or out of town. The Gestapo go house to house. They search everywhere. They push families out into streets and loot their homes. Men are taken to the Horak family barn. Biggest building in the village. Women and children are herded into the school building. Then, at five o’clock in the morning, the shooting starts.”
Eliška lowered her head, as if she’d said as much as she could say. Jack knew the rest from his research. All the men were shot dead by a firing squad. The children were taken from their mothers and, except for those selected for reeducation in German families and babies under one year of age, were poisoned by exhaust gas in specially adapted vehicles in the Nazi extermination camp at Chełmno upon Nerr in Poland. The women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, which usually meant quick or lingering death for the inmates. The town was burned to the ground. Even its cemeteries