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Chapter39 Heydrich murdered! Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler's deputy, had been murdered in a village in Czechoslovakia.1 The perpetrator was unknown. What did the Geheime Staatspolizei and the SS do? The village was set on fire and the ground was razed, while all male and female villagers were arrested and taken into custody. One day, then, the entire female population of this place was delivered to the Ravensbriick Concentration Camp. The eldest villager was almost eighty years old. This happened at the time when I was still block elder in Block II. We in our barracks had alreadylearned that new admittees had arrived. We heard a wild noise. What could possibly be going on out there? Other admittees came silently and without a sound. What could this shrieking mean? Then one of the camp runners came to me with this assignment: "You are to come up to the front immediately; I have to get all the other block elders as well. You are to help control the new admittees who are resisting the orders of the SS! Bring the barracks elders with you!" So there werefinallysome admittees who did not let themselves be intimidated, who dared not to bow down to the power of the SS! I was curious about the "new ones," who were, in my eyes, extremely courageous. 1. Reinhard Heydrich (1904-42) was the head of the Reich's Central Security Office and the chief architect of the Nazis' plan to exterminate European Jewry. Heydrich was the first to order the concentration ofJews in ghettos and the mass deportations ofJews out of Germany and Austria. He also organized the Wannsee Conference in 1942, where top Nazis laid out plans for the "Final Solution." In 1941 Heydrich became the Deputy Reich's Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and moved to Prague to speed along the process of deportation and extermination there. In May 1942, Heydrich was riding in an open car (flouting security measures) in the Czech village of Lidice when two Czech agents threw a bomb under the car and began shooting at Heydrich. Heydrich ultimately died of his wounds on June 4, 1942. As Nanda describes, the Nazis took extreme measures of retribution for Heydrich's assassination. They executed all the men ofLidice and deported all the town's women, having burned down the entire village. The killings extended well beyond the bounds of Lidice to Prague and Berlin as well. 213 The Blessed Abyss When we block elders arrived in front of the office of the chief overseer with our barracks elders, many women were lying on their bundles on the ground, cursing and crying. They lashed out whenever the SS guards got close to them, allowed nothing to be told them, and did not follow the commands to go into the office in order to be entered onto the long, long lists of inmates who found themselves in the concentration camp. We inmates quietly came up to them and consolingly led them one at a time into the office. Despite a great expenditure of understanding and goodness, it was not easy to appease them. Didn't they have the right to defend themselves against this arbitrary arrest? We were successful in appeasing them to a certain extent, but a small portion of them kept on raging. Now they had to undress themselves completely, then they went into the delousing cabin, then into the bath. I still remember well how they refused to take off their clothes and underthings, how ashamed they were to stand there completely naked before us and before all ofthe guard personnel, and before the disgusting SS doctor, who had come in, too. I felt this shame profoundly along with them, and tried to comfort them with the fact that we had all experienced the same thing. Much was required to quiet these crying women. Almost all of them wore a necklace with a Madonna on it beneath their clothes. They clung to these medallions as they undressed and did not want to give them up. They were then brutally ripped from their necks. And the crying and sobbing recommenced again and again, especially when the heads of some of them were shorn. The commandant blustered about with his brutal voice in the midst of this, threatening detention and other punishments. When we learned during the following days what these newly delivered women had already been through and experienced, how they had all been ruthlessly taken from their houses, away from...

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