Identities of Lost Children: Consequences of Authoritarian Violence Persist Decades After Occurrence

By Ella Roerden

As the Nazis saw it, the Czech population needed punishing. Czech underground forces were responsible for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s most trusted and most valuable officials who also served as the “Protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi-occupied region that today is the Czech Republic. On June 4, 1942, he was gravely injured in an attack orchestrated by Czech exiles who had gotten military training in the West and had parachuted into Prague from the UK, and he died from his injuries shortly after. This outright act of resistance to the Nazis could not go unanswered; they had to show that they would not accept insubordination. They shot back with several acts of violence and brutality in the Czech lands and other areas under Nazi influence. One of the most notable and bloody of these many occurrences, less than a week after the assassination, was the Lidice Massacre.

Lidice was primarily a farming town, not very notable. Many of its residents also worked in nearby mines and factories. Its population numbered around five hundred men, women, and children. On June 10, 1942, this village was destroyed beyond recognition. The buildings were razed. All of the men of the village were rounded up and taken to be shot beside an old barn. They were not blindfolded and they were ordered to bring mattresses from their homes to prevent the gunshots from ricocheting. Any men who were away or missed for whatever reason were killed in a “follow-up” massacre a week later. All of the women and children of Lidice were rounded up as well. Most of the women were taken to Ravensbrück and other camps, and many died, but over a hundred survived the war and returned to Lidice afterward. The fates of the children, on the other hand, were an entirely different story. Only seventeen lived to return to Lidice after the war ended. The majority of the children, over eighty of them, were sent to be gassed at Chelmno extermination camp. Seven were sent to an orphanage in Prague, and nine were deemed “Aryan” enough in appearance to be selected for “Germanization,” placement into German families who would raise them. The German families were chosen for being Hitler’s archetype of what an Aryan family should look like, upstanding and faithful to the regime.

This last category of the children of Lidice, those who were seized from the arms of their mothers and shipped West to “deserving” German families, presents a unique and interesting case for study. Many would call these nine children “lucky,” for having made it out with their lives, but they have endured a different kind of suffering, that of unknown or changing identity. Any who were old enough to remember the day they were taken away from Lidice must have been left with traumatizing memories. They would also remember their real parents, wondering what became of them, and be placed in the challenging situation of navigating life with new “families” and fabricated identities. Those who didn’t remember would have a different situation, as they would simply be raised to believe they were exactly the authentic Aryans their German “parents” said they were. After World War II, these children were identified, repatriated and returned to Lidice, to whoever had survived of their original families. After three years or more living with German families, these children’s lives had been irreparably changed. Many of them, as observed in video testimonies shown at the Lidice Museum, no longer spoke the same language as their mothers or recognized their faces. Their lives had to be reinvented, again.

All of this change would likely be very difficult for children to deal with. Children who remembered would have spent years wondering what had become of their families, and then be taken back to find either a happy surprise or a very tragic one. Children from Lidice who never knew their real families until after the war would then suffer the loss of the family they’d grown up in and seen as their own. While the Nazis likely didn’t expect the children to ever be reunited with their families, as they didn’t expect to lose the war, this seems to be a lasting, if unintentional form of punishment. The consequences of Nazi actions, revenge for the sake of revenge, have lasted for decades. Some of the children who were retrieved and returned to Lidice, later rebuilt a few hundred meters from the ruins of the original village and still standing today, would arrive to find that their mothers did not survive the camps. It would be unsurprising to learn that several of these children dealt with forms of survivor’s guilt. As they each grew up, they lived with the fact that so many of their family members and friends had been lost. This feeling of punishing, devastating loss went the other way too, as most of the women who returned home never saw their children again, and had to watch as their friends, sisters, and other women were reunited with their kids. The “children” of Lidice who survived by having their families, cultures, and identities stripped of them are now all old and some have died naturally, but they spent their whole lives in the shadow of those who didn’t have that opportunity. Nothing was ever the same after Hitler and the Nazis decided to exact revenge.

When I first heard about these “lost” children of Lidice, I was immediately reminded that the displacement and forcing of new identities onto children in this manner has happened elsewhere throughout history. The occurrence I am most familiar with is that which happened during the Military Junta Dictatorship that took place in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. This regime was responsible for the deaths of as many as 30,000 people (both outright assassinations and, much more frequently, “disappearances” of people who were arrested and never seen again and whose fates were never revealed to their families by the government). These victims could be anyone who was deemed a dissident, various intellectuals and artists, and people involved in underground organizations. Oftentimes, these were young people, and there were hundreds of cases where one or both parents of infants would be taken away, and the babies would be taken with them. There were other instances where women were pregnant when taken into custody never to be seen again, or were raped in captivity and became pregnant as a result. Thus, over four hundred children were taken into or born in captivity. For those who were taken with their children or were pregnant going into the prisons and torture centers, their families knew the babies existed. But no babies were ever sent back to live with their grandparents or other relatives, and no information was to be had about their fate.

The truth was that, similarly to Lidice, these babies were sent to live with, or more precisely, illegally adopted out to, high-ranking military families involved with the Junta. They were torn from their mothers’ arms and stripped of their identities. Many didn’t even have the chance to be named or held by their mothers. They were raised up to be loyal to the regime, and for the most part, their adopted parents never told them of their true identities (if they had, there was every chance they would turn out to hate the military and the government just like their real parents). A majority of them lived into adulthood never learning who they truly were.

That’s where an organization called the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) comes in. This group was composed of the generation of the mothers of those taken into custody and “disappeared” for working against the Junta. Thanks to whispered rumors that worked their way from the army to the general public, noticeable discrepancies in adoptions, and rare survivor testimonies, family members (usually mothers) of the disappeared realized their grandchildren likely had not met the same fate as their parents, that they were still alive and hidden somewhere. The Abuelas became a well-known group working to identify these children and restore their identities. Once the Junta fell in 1983, the Abuelas kept working. Their efforts led to the establishment of the National Bank of Genetic Data and improved DNA science in Argentina. As of today, over one hundred of an assumed four hundred of these “lost” children have been identified, and the Abuelas’ work continues.

However, time takes its toll. Imagine living your whole life believing in one assigned identity, having no reason not to. Then you find out you’re someone else entirely, and not only that, but that the “parents” who raised you were involved in (indirectly or sometimes directly), the murder of your real parents. The majority of these “recovered” children only discovered the truth in adulthood. Some of them are now grandparents themselves. The amount of time that has passed begs the question of whether or not it’s ethically better to tell them the truth, or to follow the “ignorance is bliss” policy, assuming that it’s kinder not to upend their entire lives so late in life. That in itself is a form of violence that persists decades after it originally occurred—both having life-changing information and having to decide whether to share it, and being put in the situation of having a hidden identity in the first place. To connect Argentina’s dictatorship back to the case of Lidice, in both instances, innocent children had their lives altered irrevocably, with the effects continuing for as long as they live. This revenge by the Nazis and punishment by the Junta knows no end because of the cruelty of these authoritarian regimes. The legacies of their violence live on through time even after they are long gone, just one of so many reasons why we must learn from the past and never let stories like these happen again.

References

1. Barber, H., Roa, B. (2025). I am one of the last of the Abuelas—the grandmothers still searching for Argentina’s ‘disappeared.’ I’m 87, but I will never give up. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/aug/06/grandmothers-argentina-disappeared-legacy-reunited
2. BBC (2012). Survivor of Lidice massacre ‘grateful’ to Stoke-on-Trent people. BBC Online. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-19506080
3. Global Ministries. Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Argentina. https://www.globalministries.org/partner/lac_partners_abuelas_de_plaza_de_mayo/
4. Illichmann, C. (2005). Lidice: Remembering the women and children. UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research VIII. https://www.uwlax.edu/globalassets/offices-services/urc/jur-online/pdf/2005/illichman.pdf
5. Solly, M. (2018). The lost children of the Lidice Massacre. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-lidice-massacre-180970242/
6. Wechsberg, J. (1948). The children of Lidice. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/05/01/the-children-of-lidice