Eighty-eight Lidice children were separated from their mothers and deported from Czechoslovakia by the Nazi Main Race and Resettlement Authority to a transit camp in Łódź, Poland, at Gneisenaustraße 41. The children were put in a former textile factory, where two halls on the upper floor had been reserved for them.

There, they slept on a bare floor and covered themselves with what was available to them; they ate meagre food rations, and the older children looked after the younger ones—the youngest child was a mere 13 months old.

A nurse, Julia Makowska, gave evidence of the children’s maltreatment at the camp and attempted to provide better rations for them. A prisoner at the camp who could speak Czech and was a doctor, Jan Zielina, also testified to the children’s poor condition and malnutrition.

For the chief of the relocation headquarters, SS-Oberstrumbannführer Hermann Krumey, the children were an irritant. He repeatedly telegrammed Berlin, looking for a swift solution to the problem of the Lidice children that meant less work for him. His telegram sent to Gestapo Headquarters on the 22nd of June 1942 was fateful:

This meant the final decision of the Main Reich Security Office in Berlin to hand the total of 81 children of Lidice over to the State Police department in Łódź. This order de facto meant to kill them all. The Gestapo never occupied themselves with matters of re-education or Germanizing children; this was a task for Nazi organizations like the Lebensborn or the Hitler Youth.

To lift their spirits, the Nazis encouraged the children to write postcards to their relatives. Although written in despair, they were still full of hope, gratitude, and anticipation of better times to come. All the postcards were mailed in Łódź on July the 4th 1942.

It is likely that the children met their fate with promises of good health, food, hot baths, and decent clothing. To assuage any fears they may have had, in all likelihood they walked along a well-lit corridor into a chamber reassuringly presented as a doctor’s waiting room, with posters and signs on the walls and even sweets on a table. However, once inside the converted van, the door was firmly shut and the engine was started, its exhaust outlet filling the inside of the van with lethal gas.

As the cries subsided, most likely the van was driven some four kilometres through forests to mass graves. There the children were buried alongside countless other victims. As the tide of the war turned, the Nazis exhumed and cremated the bodies in an effort to remove any trace of their crimes.

None of the above is incontrovertible, however. The nearest relatives have to closure is the circumstantial evidence provided by the testimony of Polish gardener Andrzej Miszak, who worked outside the Chełmno camp. As a witness at the Nuremberg Trials, he detailed an account of the “Czech children” arriving in lorries outside the extermination camp in the summer of 1942:

“I saw the SS men pull children out of the lorries, ranging from the youngest toddlers to maybe 14 years of age. The children were arrayed in quadruple file and led into the camp, which was surrounded by a fence about two metres high. I saw through the open gate how they led them to the mansion inside the camp… it may be that they arrived from Łódź. From the windows of my house, I saw clearly that the children (had] taken off their clothes and underwear and that they stood naked by the windows of the mansion inside the camp not far away.”