Children from Lidice in Łódź

In June 1942, a large group of children arrived at the reception camp in Łódź. They were separated and closely guarded on the first floor of one of the former factory buildings in order to prevent them from meeting other children. These were the children from Lidice who had lived through the most terrible moments of their young lives only a few short days ago. The Nazis had literally torn them away from their mothers’ arms. They were of all different ages, from one year old to fifteen. They were dirty, hungry and under stress. They were forced to sleep on the cold, concrete floor of the factory building. Each child had a nametag placed around their neck. Mostly, it was silent there because the children were not capable of crying anymore. Emilie Chválová, who was nine years old at the time, recalls the conditions in the camp: “Once a day we were allowed to go out to the yard where there was a tap with running water. The main thing was to take care of the younger children. They could not even walk and were still wearing diapers. So we washed their bottoms and did the laundry. And because we had no clean diapers for them, we would give them our T-shirts and undershirts instead. There was no hygiene whatsoever.” Emilie Chválová was one of the few children chosen for re-education. “We heard that children were killed there. So when they chose the nine of us, we said: ‘Bye-bye boys and girls. They are probably going to kill us, but there is nothing we can do about that.’ But it was the other way around,” she recalled. The majority of children from Lidice travelled directly to Chelmno, where they were most likely gassed to death. Emilie Chválová died in January 2012.