A Kind SS Man

In 1943, the Nazi officer Otto Kuckuck, the head of a labour camp, brought with him to Sassnitz on the island of Rügen at that time nine-year-old girl of Czech origin named Emílie Frejová. He discovered her in the children’s home in Pastuchów (in German called Puschkau) and decided to adopt her. He probably did not know that he had adopted one of the children who survived the massacre in Lidice and was then carted off to Poland. Emílie spent two years in Kuckuck’s house, together with her adoptive father and his wife Frieda. After the war, she was found by a special Czechoslovak government unit tasked with the repatriation of abducted Czechoslovak children. Shortly before her death in 2011, Emílie Frejová (married Chválová) still remembered how nicely the adoptive parents treated her: “They did not have their own children, but they had me and they treated me kindly. They had a dog called Senta and he was my sweetheart.” The adoptive parents even kept the orphan’s original name. Emília Frejová, who was growing up without parents even in the pre-war Lidice, formed a very strong emotional bondage to Kuckuck. When she found out later, what kind of a person he truly was and what evil the Nazis caused, she became reluctant to talk about him. “You know, when I saw the horrors they had caused, I started to hate all Germans. But I kept repeating to myself, they were not like that…But on the other hand, they really did it. It was such a shock for me that I suffered a nervous breakdown.”