Marie Supikova has passed on at 88.<\/p>\n
She was one of a small number of survivors of Lidice.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Supikova was 10 when Nazi forces arrived in Lidice, a village of about 500, on June 9, 1942. They were bent on avenging an attack by Czech parachutists on Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the \u201cfinal solution,\u201d the Nazis\u2019 plan to annihilate the Jewish people, which led to his death on June 4.<\/a>
\nLooking to eradicate Lidice (LID-it-seh), the Nazis destroyed all the village\u2019s buildings. They killed nearly 200 men, including Mrs. Supikova\u2019s father, by a firing squad against a barn wall cushioned by mattresses. The women, including Mrs. Supikova\u2019s mother, were sent to the Ravensbr\u00fcck concentration camp in Germany.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n…<\/p>\n
While there, she was one of seven children chosen because of their appearance to be re-educated as Germans (the others were sent to gas chambers). They were moved to a school near Poznan, Poland, where they stayed for about a year until they were adopted by German couples.<\/a>
\nHer new parents, Alfred and Ilsa Schiller, gave Marie a new name, Ingeborg Schiller, and a tiny room behind the kitchen in their home in Poznan. In an article in The New Yorker in 1948, Mrs. Supikova recalled that the Schillers had argued about her presence in the household.<\/a>
\n\u201cYou and your Party friends!\u201d she quoted Mrs. Schiller saying. \u201cWhy did they pick you to take this girl?\u201d Mr. Schiller, she said, shouted back, \u201cThey have ordered us to make a German woman out of her and we are going to do it.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAfter the war, she was reunited with her mother, who was dying of TB. (Her brother was also executed by the Nazis.)<\/p>\n
She bore witness to her Holocaust experience when she testified in October 1947 at the Nuremberg trial of members of the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office. Then only 15, Marie was one of three people \u2014 two teenagers and one middle-aged woman \u2014 to testify that day about the massacre and their lives afterward.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
…<\/p>\n
Before Mrs. Supikova\u2019s mother died, she took her daughter to the ruins of Lidice.<\/a>
\n\u201cShe told Marie, \u2018We\u2019re going to see your father,\u2019” said Elizabeth Clark, a retired journalism lecturer at Texas State University, San Marcos, who is writing about Lidice for a faculty writing project. \u201cMarie didn\u2019t understand at first that they were going to the mass grave where he had been buried.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nRusty Young<\/a>, one of the founding members of Poco. I feel like I’m giving him short shrift, and perhaps tim will weigh in on this one. Poco was just a little before my time.<\/p>\n
Catching up on a couple from the past few days when I’ve been tied up: Helen McCrory<\/a>, “Harry Potter” and “Peaky Blinders” actress. She also did quite a bit of work in British theater.<\/p>\n