Veronika Hyks continues her serialized reading of “If I had been a boy, I would have been shot…” by Jaroslava Skleničková, a powerful and true story of survival in wartime. David Vaughan introduces the third episode.
Veronika Hyks
Last week we heard how Jaří’s happy childhood in Lidice ended suddenly and violently on the night from the 9th to the 10th June 1942. In the middle of the night she is woken up. The family are told to pack their money, documents and valuables, and to assemble at the village school. The men and boys over fifteen are separated from the women and children. As they part, Jaří has no idea that she will never see her father again. The women and children are kept for three days in the gymnasium of the grammar school in nearby Kladno, sleeping on straw, until the German soldiers separate the women from the children. Jaří is just under three months over sixteen and, while her best friends are taken away with the children, she is the youngest girl to be put with the adult women. With her are her sister Míla and their mother, Anna. The Lidice women are marched to the station and from there taken by train to a concentration camp. Veronika Hyks reads.
