Girl With a Linden Tree and 82 Children From Lidice

About the State Bankruptcy Paid For by Citizens

On June 1, 1953, the so-called currency reform, also known as the state theft of the century, took place in Czechoslovakia, when the bankrupt communist regime preferred to have the government debt paid directly by the population rather than wiping it out through inflation. In other words, a state-led act of monetary devaluation, when people lost all their money and the state claimed it, was for their own good.

The basis of the situation was the financial consequences of World War II – the Czechoslovak crown was backed by gold, but at the values of 1936. However, there was much more money in circulation, and claims against Germany, which amounted to the entire country’s annual economic output, posed a significant problem. The Communists compounded these problems with a centrally planned economy that prioritized heavy industry and arms production due to the Cold War that had already begun.

Eighty percent of consumer goods were sold through a rationing system, but there were also free and black markets. Through a currency reform, the state eliminated the rationing system, but above all, it destroyed people’s savings. Exchange rates were set so that richer people would be hit harder – although this is relative, because in the end it was draconian for everyone. Money was exchanged at a ratio of 1:50, and only a very small part at a ratio of 1:5. Of the 52 billion crowns in circulation, only 1.4 billion remained after the reform…

The impact was so strong that it sparked massive anti-regime demonstrations, even though five years had passed since the Communist coup of 1948 and the Communists were ruling Czechoslovakia with an iron fist, of course with Soviet political advisers backing them.

People had been afraid for months that there would be some kind of state attack on their wallets, but the state assured them that nothing would happen. “Our currency is stable, and there will be no currency reform. These are all rumors spread by class enemies.” This is what President Antonín Zápotocký reportedly said on May 29, 1953 (the original recording of the speech was destroyed by the communists, so the quote is now part of “collective memory”).

Since the Communists delayed the currency reform until the very last moment, it was clear that the new money could not be produced in Czechoslovakia. Therefore, on November 17, 1952, the government turned to the Soviet Union with a request to print banknotes. The banknotes were printed in Moscow, and the coins were minted in Leningrad (formerly and now once again St. Petersburg).

In 1957, the Communist regime decided to introduce new banknotes and coins to replace those that had been hastily and secretly produced in Moscow and St. Petersburg. But this is where a historical paradox enters the story: every Communist had in his pocket or wallet a portrait of a girl whom their regime had sentenced to ten years in prison in a show trial.

A Revolver With a Mother-of-Pearl Grip and an Anti-Government Conspiracy

In 1954, Bedřiška Synková was an ordinary girl. She was a student who loved the idea of Scouting, which is why she led the Ostříži (Hobbies) Scout troop. In February 1948, immediately after the Communist coup, the Scouts were incorporated into the Czechoslovak Youth Union, and two years later, the Scouting movement as a whole was banned.

Many Scouts, however, refused to give up on the idea of Scouting. Some joined the active resistance, while many others continued to meet in secret, hoping that the communist regime would soon fall. Bedřiška herself later said in a Czech Television documentary: “We didn’t harm anyone, nor did we want to harm anyone. But we didn’t consider it necessary to respect the ban on Scouting. Because we didn’t know why.”

Bedřiška led her group until 1953, when she came of age and thus became criminally liable. She then disbanded the group. Nevertheless, she was arrested by the Communist secret police in August 1954. The crimes she was alleged to have committed were: deflating the tires of a bus, cutting a telephone line, destroying a Communist Party bulletin board, and possession of weapons. However, the weapons she was in possession of were a pretty mother-of-pearl inlaid ladies’ revolver with a drilled-through barrel, which a friend had once given her, and a spear, a prop for a theater performance. Other crimes attributed to Bedřiška and forty other Scouts included allegedly planning to break into a warehouse where military telephones were stored, as well as allegedly planning to set fire to a wood warehouse. The communist public prosecutor said: “It doesn’t matter that these acts didn’t happen, because it’s enough that they made preparations for such attacks or agreed to them.”

After eight months of interrogations, often conducted at night, she was charged with treason and sentenced to ten years, a sentence that was reduced to eight years on appeal. In the verdict, the judge wrote that the Scout movement was “an instrument of the bourgeoisie,” that it was also “a vehicle for cosmopolitanism,” and that it taught young people to admire Great Britain and the United States and to “recognize the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons.”

Nineteen-year-old Bedřiška was imprisoned in Pardubice and then in a labor camp in southern Slovakia. From spring through fall, the female prisoners there were put to work on farms, but conditions were worse in the winter. As she herself says: “Prostitutes and murderers were usually put to work in the stables during the winter. It was warm there, and they had everything they needed. They threw out manure or milked cows. Political prisoners were given picks and had to dig ditches in the frozen ground around the stables to drain the slurry.”

Bedřiška was released after serving five years of her sentence, but the circumstances of her release were just as absurd as those of her arrest. Her mother decided to fight for her. She first requested her release in 1958. At that time, she was told that her daughter “had not yet been re-educated in socialism and showed signs of the influence of Anglo-Saxon youth culture.”

She tried again a year later. She went to the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (ÚV KSČ) to submit a request for her daughter’s release. Not knowing who to go to, she randomly chose an official whose name she read on a list at the entrance. So, she’d chosen the official completely at random. The official didn’t know what it was about, and because a totalitarian regime is always full of fear, he refused to take the document. But Mrs. Synková told him that if he didn’t take the paper, she would go to his colleague, who was sitting one floor up. This seemed like a threat to the official. Mrs. Synková later commented: “He didn’t know if I was some big shot. Everyone was afraid of everyone else.”

That is why the official told Mrs. Synková to give him the application, and he then took it to Antonín Novotný – who was both First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and President of the Republic – for his signature. Mrs. Synková continued: “Since it was at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Novotný signed it without even knowing what he was signing.”

And Bedřiška was indeed released. However, because she refused to give in to the regime’s pressure to cooperate with the secret police, she was not allowed to attend evening classes at the high school, as she had wished, and had to work in a field unrelated to her studies. She married Evžen Hoffmann, and in 1967 their son Albert was born. In the mid-1960s, as the political climate in Czechoslovakia began to ease, Bedřiška once again started a small Girl Scout troop, where she trained girls to lead other children in Scouting activities themselves.

However, on August 21, 1968 everything changed. The Russian occupation began. Bedřiška and her family emigrated to Vienna, and from there to Switzerland (at that time, she changed her name to Frederike – she had inherited the name Bedřiška from her father and had never liked it). She remained politically active even in exile. She led the World Association of Former Political Prisoners and published the magazine Mukl. (To clarify: the word “mukl” is a common slang term in Czech for a prisoner. However, it originated during the political trials of the 1950s, when men were sent to work in uranium mines (most of the uranium went directly to Russia and they were never to be released.) So MUKL is an acronym from the term “muž určený k likvidaci”, i.e., man designated for liquidation.

In 2021, she returned permanently to the Czech Republic; she is now 91 years old (born March 7, 1935).

“Every Bolshevik Carried a Picture of Me in His Pocket.”

Bedřiška’s mother worked as a secretary at one of Prague’s art schools, where she had met the sculptor, Marie Uchytilová Kučová. When she once told Marie Uchytilová about her daughter’s fate, it greatly upset her. She couldn’t bear the thought that the regime was locking up “our children”. Coincidentally, this was at a time when the regime was replacing coins and banknotes hastily produced in Russia. The crown at that time was a paper bill that was to be replaced by a coin. The Ministry of Finance therefore announced a competition, which ultimately received 107 entries.

As Bedřiška Synková later recounted, the sculptor asked her mother for some photographs of her daughter: “Bring me a photograph. I’ll try to work it into the design and put it on the crown. But no one must know about this.” That second sentence was very important, because if it were revealed, the regime would have accused her of sabotage or provocation and thrown her in prison. It was all the worse because Marie Uchytilová Kučová had also incorporated a clear political message into the design. When you place a coin on the map, the face of the girl planting the linden tree faces west, not east, toward Russia. The sculptor herself described it as revenge against the regime: all the Bolsheviks would carry that crown in their pockets every day without realizing that it depicts a girl who, because of them, was innocently sitting in prison.

The committee of the Ministry of Finance reviewed the designs anonymously over three rounds. Five designs out of the original 107 advanced to the final round. The committee recommended the design featuring a metallurgist for minting. This was likely because the Cold War between the East and the West had been going on for ten years, and the Soviet Union was forcing all the conquered countries to engage in massive development of heavy industry, including the arms industry.

The chairman of the commission, Josef Lhota, later said that Finance Minister Július Ďuriš had the designs shown to him, from which the winning metallurgist was chosen. He reportedly looked at them for only ten minutes, and pointed to the girl with the linden tree: “This one will be minted.” And so the Communist minister decided that the girl, whom the regime had unjustly imprisoned, would be in everyone’s sight every day. The coin was in circulation from September 2, 1957, to September 30, 1993, when it was replaced by the new Czech crown following the division of Czechoslovakia. It thus became the longest-circulating currency in the history of Czechoslovak coinage.

The Lidice Tragedy

This secret of the one-crown coin was known only to three women until the Velvet Revolution: Bedřiška Synková, her mother, and sculptor Marie Uchytilová. Her life’s work, however, was the sculpture of 82 children from Lidice who were murdered in the extermination camp in Chelmno, Poland…

On May 27, 1942, Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich was seriously wounded by Czechoslovak paratroopers sent from England. This was immediately followed by a brutal campaign of terror known as “heydrichiáda” (or the Heydrich Terror in English). Martial law was declared, and arrests and executions began.

On June 4, Heydrich died of his wounds. He was buried on June 9, 1942. On the same day, Adolf Hitler personally decided that the village of Lidice would be completely destroyed. This was done as a warning, with a purely contrived pretext. By 10 p.m., the village was surrounded and hermetically sealed off. The animals were taken to the farm in Buštěhrad; the women and children were first gathered in the Lidice school, and later they were taken to the high school in Kladno. Men over 15 years of age were concentrated at the Horák Farm (Hitler originally wanted this to apply to men under 60, but even men over 60 were not given an exemption in the end). In the morning, all the men were shot. Among them was a farmhand who had started working for one of the Lidice farmers on the morning of June 9.

A truck full of Jewish prisoners arrived from the ghetto at the Terezín fortress to dig a grave for the men of Lidice. It was supposed to be 10 by 15 meters and four meters deep. However, because the digging proceeded more slowly than expected, the prisoners ultimately dug a pit 3.5 meters deep. They worked from morning on one day, through the entire night, until noon the next day. During that time, they were given nothing to eat. Eighteen-year-old Viktor Laš, who was one of the prisoners digging the grave, recalled: “Someone must have told the dead that they were going somewhere, because each of them had some bread or a snack in their pocket. And Commander Siegfried Seidl generously declared that we could keep it and eat it. But that went against our conscience. It was out of the question.”

Only one man survived the Lidice massacre: František Saidl. He was in prison at the time, and the Germans had forgotten about him. He was in prison because he had killed his son in a fight. His son had attacked him with a stick due to family disputes; František Saidl stabbed him once – unfortunately, fatally. The father immediately went to turn himself in and was sentenced to four years in prison. After the Lidice tragedy, neither the guards nor his fellow inmates told him what had happened. When he was released from prison, he stopped by a neighboring village for a beer, but no one there told him anything either. And then he came within sight of Lidice. One might expect that it was from the spot where the memorial stands today – it’s near the road, and from there you can see the entire valley where the village once lay as clearly as the palm of your hand. But there was absolutely nothing there – just a snow-covered plain.

He didn’t know the whole truth yet. His two other sons had been shot during the Lidice massacre, and his wife had been taken to a concentration camp, from which she never returned. And their house “disappeared” – just like the entire village of Lidice. It was the evening of December 23, 1942. František Saidl spent Christmas Eve in the village, at the spot where their house had once stood. The next day, he reported to the Gestapo headquarters in Kladno and asked to be shot. The Gestapo commander refused and did not change his mind, even when František Saidl backed up his request by declaring that he approved of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. They sent him away…

“My Sculptures That I Make for Your Children Are Silent in All the Languages of the World…”

There were a total of 105 children from Lidice. Nine were sent to Germany to be Germanized. Seven were placed in an orphanage. Seven were born after the tragedy. Eighty-two were murdered in Chelmno. Only 17 returned home after the war. And “home” does not mean what we typically imagine when we hear that word. Their village had been burned down and then razed to the ground. All of their fathers had been shot in the courtyard of the Horák Farm. And for many, their mothers never returned from the concentration camp.

In happier times. Most of these children were murdered in Chelmno

Shortly after the war, Marie Uchytilová decided to create a work that would honor the memory of the millions of children who had perished during the war – a cry of humanity’s conscience. The immediate impetus for this was a meeting with a classmate who had returned from a concentration camp and told her about the horrors she had experienced there. Marie then spent every day painting or even sculpting at least a small sketch of a child’s figure or head. Reportedly, she may have created thousands of them. In 1969, however, it occurred to her that she could create a memorial to honor specific victims. And she chose the children of Lidice.

The idea came to her on All Souls’ Day, when she realized that on that day, candles were lit on the graves of all the dead – except for the children of Lidice, who had nothing. Not even graves. The thought was so powerful that she set out on foot that very evening, walking 20 kilometers to Lidice. She arrived there around midnight. Her daughter, Sylvie Klánová, recalls: “She told me it was a cold, silvery, misty, moonlit night. Candles were burning in the cemetery and at the mass grave of the men of Lidice. Through her tears, their glow blurred before her eyes into golden rays. And in her imagination, she saw them coming toward her: eighty-two children from Lidice, murdered in 1942 at the Nazi extermination camp in Chelmno.”

She returned home that morning and, within twelve hours, created a 1:10 scale model of the memorial. She then showed the model to all the surviving mothers from Lidice. One by one, each of them told her about their lost children. They even lent her photographs – the most precious things they had left of their children. And then they told her, “Work on this, and we’ll fight for it.”

And Marie Uchytilová set out to tackle this overwhelming task. The number of children, as well as their age distribution and gender, are accurate, but their likenesses are not exact. This was done so as not to hurt the women of Lidice. Yet they still recognized their children in the faces of the sculptures – so intense was their pain. “From every face here, 150,000 others are looking back at me,” said the sculptor herself, thinking of the 13 million child victims of the war.

She worked on the monument for a total of twenty years, spending twelve to eighteen hours a day on it during the first ten years. Forty thousand hours. “I measure time by light and darkness; I simply struggle with the material, burning with passion day and night, heedless of hardship and need – I create.” Her husband, Jiří Václav Hampl, said: “Marie believed in the power of that idea. She was convinced that this was the only way to convey the tragedy – only when people see all the children together will they realize what a horror it was! So many child victims from just one small village… and all of this took place in the heart of Europe!”

The government had no interest in such a memorial. It is unclear why. However, this refusal may be related to the fact that Lidice was burned to the ground in response to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich – an act carried out by Czechoslovak soldiers sent from Great Britain.

When RAF pilots and paratroopers returned home from Britain after the war, they were welcomed as heroes. After the communist putsch in February 1948, the regime branded them as traitors. They were imprisoned or sent to forced-labor camps, mostly uranium mines. And they were not the only ones whom the communist regime “rewarded” in this way. One need only recall what it did to General Karel Kutlvašr, who led the Prague Uprising in May 1945.

Marie drew the strength to overcome obstacles from the visits of thousands of people from all over the world who came to encourage her and bring flowers or toys intended for the children’s sculptures. Marie welcomed visitors, but not while she was sculpting a child’s head. In the words of her daughter Sylvia, who herself served as a model for some of the girls’ figures: “It was just her and the child. She knew whether the child was healthy or sick, naughty or well-behaved… She had a photograph of the child in front of her, even though she didn’t transfer a lifelike likeness to the sculpture. But she tried to imprint her own emotions onto the child’s facial expression. She said she had to die eighty-two times to experience the fate of every child, in order to create its face.”

Marie Uchytilová with “her” children; Sylvia Klánová, Marie Uchytilová’s daughter, occasionally served as a model for her mother; Sylvia Klánová and her “siblings”

Marie had the first three figures cast in bronze in 1982 at her own expense. Japan offered to purchase the monument and erect it in Hiroshima. In 1988, Germany, through Chancellor Helmut Kohl, offered to purchase the monument and donate it to Lidice. The Czech Ministry of Culture offered only to purchase the plaster models and store them in a depository. However, she did not want that, because she knew that would be the end of the monument.

In response, Marie Uchytilová composed a poem that began with the words: “Oh envy, you leprosy of cursed souls!” In June 1989, she wrote in a letter to the women of Lidice: “I am devastated by injustice, indifference, and irresponsibility… I regret ever having been born in our beautiful and terrible country.” Just two days before her death, she said in a radio interview: “The mothers of Lidice must weep for those children a second time, and I feel that the children of Lidice are being murdered a second time – at home.”

Then, at the age of just 65, she died of a massive heart attack.  However, her husband and daughter, Sylvie Klánová, kept the promise they had made to her and completed the memorial. 82 statues were cast in bronze and installed in Lidice. Total financial contributions amounted to 12 million crowns, the vast majority of which came from abroad…

After the Velvet Revolution, the Ministry of Culture finally approved the construction of the memorial. The statues have been placed in Lidice since 1995. The last five were installed on June 10, 2000 – exactly 58 years to the day after the Lidice tragedy.

The memorial was unveiled in Lidice in June 2000. Visitors to the Lidice Memorial bring toys, chewing gum, and candy for the children. Kristina Tělupilová, one of the memorial’s lecturers, said: “My son sees the sculptures as children who used to live in old Lidice, and then something terrible happened and they turned to stone. At different times of day – when it’s foggy, or the sun is setting – they look different. When it rains, raindrops run down their faces like tears.”

Many people bring toys or candy for the children at the memorial

A Promise Made on One’s Deathbed and a Telling Photo

Karel Čapek, one of the greatest Czech writers, wrote the play Mother shortly before the war; it premiered on February 12, 1938, at the National Theater. It tells the story of a woman who gradually loses her husband and four sons during the war. Her youngest son also wants to go fight, but his desperate mother locks herself and him in the basement of their house. Then, however, she hears on the radio that enemy soldiers are murdering even small children. She hands her last son a rifle and says a sentence that every Czech who paid even a little attention at school knows: “Go, Toni.”

(You can download the drama for free in Czech from the Municipal Library’s website; the English version is available on Amazon.)

The suffering of the women of Lidice cannot be compared from one to another, even though some lost one child, some lost three, and some were still childless at the time of the Lidice tragedy but lost all the male members of their families. One of the women of Lidice said after the war that her mother had been unable to walk for twenty years at that time, due to severe rheumatism. So they carried her in a chair to the assembly point at the school and then to the concentration camp. She, a loving daughter, later said that if she had known what awaited them all, she would have carried her mother out into the garden and killed her there with an axe so that she wouldn’t have had to go through what was in store for them.

However, Marie Hroníková’s fate surpassed even Karel Čapek’s appeal and imagination…

Václav and Františka Hroník had nine children. Their daughter Marie had already passed away by that time, and their daughter Terezie did not live with the family in Lidice. The other seven children were between the ages of 20 and one year, and Františka was pregnant with the youngest at the time. Only Květa, aged 16, returned from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Václav (20) was shot along with his father. Božena (13), Zdeňka (11), Zdeněk (7), and Marta (1) were killed along with 78 other children from Lidice in Chełmno, Poland, on July 2, 1942. This happened in trucks into which exhaust fumes were forced. The children suffocated from carbon monoxide in the moving truck (nicknamed “The Hell Vans” by those living in the Chelmno village due to the screaming that came out of them as they drove by). The truth about this was revealed in 1946 by the driver, who, in an effort to ease his conscience on his deathbed, confessed to a priest.

As the Germans were rounding up the residents of Lidice on that horrific night, Václav Hroník realized that his 20-year-old son, Václav, was with him, and that his pregnant wife would be left to care for the remaining children. And because he wanted to make it easier for her and had absolutely no idea that the men would be shot, he called on his son Josef, who would be 15 years old on August 16, to join his father. Josef obeyed his father and thus became the youngest man from Lidice to be shot.

The Hroníks’ tenth child was František, who had not yet been born. His mother gave birth to him in Ravensbrück. Immediately after the birth, Nazi guards suffocated him in front of her eyes…

Františka Hroníková lived to be 78 years old (August 11, 1900 – January 31, 1979). As she lay on her deathbed, Marie Uchytilová Kučová swore to her that she would complete the memorial to the children of Lidice. And she kept that promise. Although the faces of the children’s statues are very realistic, she deliberately did not create the likenesses of real Lidice children. She did this so as not to hurt the feelings of their mothers, who had survived the war (143 out of the original 203). But because the ages and genders of the children in the sculptures correspond to those of the real children, and many of the children are holding hands or protecting their siblings, many women from Lidice were able to guess which sculpture was their child’s.

In 1992, Sylvia Klánová, the daughter of Marie Uchytilová, brought a statue of one of the children to Lidice. It wasn’t the one cast in bronze, but a plaster statue patinated to look like bronze. And just by coincidence, at that very moment, a meeting of the women of Lidice was taking place in the municipal office building in New Lidice, built right next to the site of the original Lidice. So the photograph that Sylvia Klánová quickly took says it all. Notice the eyes and hands of the Lidice women…

In the photo are (from left):
– in a white dress, Mrs. Olga Horešovská (her son was 2 weeks old at the time of the Lidice tragedy; he returned to her after the war)
– in a blue blouse, Mrs. Anna Straková Klímová (she lost three daughters)
– in a light blouse, Mrs. Anna Nešporová is bending down (she lost her daughter)
– in the middle of the women in a darker dress, Mrs. Milada Cábová (childless at the time of the tragedy, so she “only” lost the male members of her family; she was supposed to get married in November 1942. Her fiancé waited for her until she returned from the concentration camp)
– on the far right is Mrs. Růžena Krásová (she lost her daughter)

One would not need to know anything at all about the whole story of the monument to the children of Lidice to understand the magnitude of the work of sculptor Maria Uchytilová from this photograph.

Instead of an Epilogue

When the government decided to print new banknotes in Russia before the currency reform, it sent a request for it on November 17, 1952. On the same day in 1939, the Nazis brutally suppressed student demonstrations, which also resulted in the closure of universities. On the same day in 1989, a student demonstration was brutally suppressed again – this time by another totalitarian power, the Communists.

Marie Uchytilová opposed injustice and totalitarianism with her work all her life. She died suddenly, at only 65 years old, on November 16, 1989. One day before the Velvet Revolution, which freed us from totalitarianism.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Photos: Zachary Barnes)

Until June 9, 1942, it was a completely ordinary village. It had a church, a store, boys who climbed the neighbor’s pear tree, and a dog that stole a wreath of sausages from the butcher’s shop. It had women who gathered for a chat at the water pump, and it even had a cart driver who drove sacks of flour – or grain in his horse-drawn cart. For no reason at all and by an unfortunate twist of fate, that lively village became a memorial site where you’re greeted by 82 bronze children by Marie Uchytilová, tears streaming down their faces when it rains.

Absolutely every Czech knows the fate of Lidice. Most people have seen the archival footage of the burning village and the dead men lying in rows in front of the barn on the Horák Farm. In front of the barn, whose walls were lined with mattresses from the bedrooms of Lidice families to prevent ricocheting bullets from injuring the men of the firing squad. But it is only at the memorial in Lidice that one fully grasps the entire context. And all it takes is a children’s coloring book. A photograph secretly taken on June 11, 1942, by Czech gendarme Josef Sýkora shows St. Martin’s Church and the street in front of it. The cover of the coloring book depicts the very same spot…
(The photo is from the personal archive of the memorial director, Eduard Stehlík)

The grave of the men of Lidice

The floor plans of the church and school were rebuilt. However, the stone base with an iron hinge is from the original side entrance to the church. The Germans were thorough and wanted to destroy Lidice completely. Both ponds were filled in, the stream bed was shifted, and the terrain was in places covered with rubble from the destroyed buildings. The foundations of nearly all the houses remained underground After the war, only the foundations of the Horák Farm and this side entrance to the church were uncovered.

The last school photograph. It was taken on June 2, 1942 – one week before Adolf Hitler ordered the destruction of Lidice