He grew up with two older sisters, Maria and Anna, in the family of Václav and Anna Hanf. They lived in a sublet in Lidice in house number 70. My father worked as a miner at the Prago mine and was the commander of the local fire brigade. The mother took care of the children at home and sometimes helped the farmers in the field.
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Little Vašek did not learn much, but he liked to minister to the pastor Josef Štemberk at Mass. At the gate of the church, however, his holiness ended. He was a snake-tailed crook – he didn’t sit down and invented a barbecue every now and then.
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Vašek was angry: he refused to speak German. So the adoptive mother returned it in two months as perishable goods.
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“I was angry, angry …” he admits in a recording on the Memory of the Nation website. “Dad once sent me to a pub for the Shefenders for a beer. He likes out of the mug. I came home with that mug, and after a while my dad called me, ‘Vendo, come here! (…) Were you there when he made you a beer? (…) I wanted a liter and a half and I only have a liter. ‘ And so I looked and said, ‘Dad, he Fanda was with me and I’ll tell you honestly, we drank a little on the way.’ (…) He bent me over the knee and I got a few over my ass. “
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The idyllic childhood ended in the second grade, just a few days after Wenceslas celebrated his eighth birthday. It was written on June 10, 1942, when Lidice was surrounded by SS units in the morning. “They woke us up at night, Dad wasn’t home. There was a terrible scream all over Lidice. The Germans ordered us to leave the house, we were not allowed to take anything, we did not know what would happen, “he recalled.
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He spent the night with other women and children in Lidice at a school in Lidice and another two nights in the gymnasium of the Kladno real grammar school. “I remember that there were piles of straw, every family took a handful, we stopped and lay on it for three days,” recalls Václav Zelenka, another of the rescued children from Lidice, in the publication Book of the Living by Magda Hettnerová.
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Then the Nazis forcibly separated the children from their mothers. That was the last time Václav Hanf saw his mother, she later died in Ravensbrück. Little did he know that Dad, who had returned home from the night shift downstairs, was no longer alive. And that he would never see Lidice’s grandmother with his grandfather, his mother’s parents.
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Lidice, June 10, 1942
Photo: ČTK
Yet he was lucky in misfortune. While most of his Lidice peers ended up in the mobile gas chambers of the Chełmno concentration camp, Vašek and his two older sisters were destined for adoption. They were waiting for their new German parents in the Puschkau children’s home in Poland. When the middle Anička was adopted by the home’s employee Elisabeth Strauss, the little girl literally cried for her new mother to take home and her brother.
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Place of adoption criminal camp
Vašek got a new name, he became Hans Joachim Strauss. They were only allowed to speak German with their sister at home: “How many times did they catch us because we didn’t understand German yet and couldn’t explain what we wanted. And we still remembered where our Maruška is. I didn’t know about that until the end of the war, “said Václav Hanf.
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His adoptive father – a soldier and a member of the SS – did not live at home, only Mrs. Elisabeth took care of the children. And Vašek was angry again: he refused to speak German, he did not want to go to a German school. So the adoptive mother returned it in two months as perishable goods …
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He got another name, this time Polish: Jan Wenzel. And his journey through the Hitlerjugend educational camps began. The boys were still young in the first camp in Oberwies. In the morning they had a German school, in the afternoon the basics of military training without weapons.
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“Not that they beat us, but there was a terrible drill … We had to practice all sorts of exercises – push-ups, squats and the like, up to the limit of endurance. I know that even older boys shed tears many times. When our leaders left somewhere, they drove us into one class and from morning to evening we were not allowed to move or talk to each other. We had to be absolutely calm. It was terrible, “describes Vašek’s younger friend Václav Zelenka in the Book of the Living.
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Hitlerjugend training was a real drill. Pictured is air defense training.
Photo: Wikipedia / Federal Archives
Even there, Vašek Hanf did not deny the urchin. “On the bunk above him hung a light on the ceiling, such a white ball. He said, ‘Guys, look!’ and punched her. Of course, the light broke and Vašek had to go to the prison, “recalls Václav Zelenka. Klukovina told Vašek ten days about bread and water in a dungeon in a local chapel.
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But it should have been worse. The criminal camp in Maria-Schmoll marked Václav Hanf to death. Again, this was his rebellion: he refused to train with a weapon. “When they gave us the rifles, I didn’t want her, so I put her down like that – by throwing. And I said to myself, and I said it out loud in Czech, that I didn’t want to be a soldier. I don’t know what came to my mind then, because I didn’t know anything about Lidice, but I just didn’t want to be German anymore. “
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An angry SS man kicked the boy in the left knee. It was a crushing blow, and the operation did not prevent lifelong consequences: Vašek has had his left leg 3.5 centimeters shorter since then.
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The lady came into the office and said: “Venus, Vaška Hanfovic, it’s you, good that you met!”
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However, it could have been worse: he had witnessed a public execution in the camp with his own eyes. “He was an older boy … I had a fight with a warden and ran away. And when they caught him, they cut off his head in front of us in front of us as a warning … It was said that whoever does not listen and will resist that the same thing will happen to him, “he recalls.
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This is me!
The war ended and Vaška was transferred to a concentration camp near Salzburg. He tried to explain that he was Czech from Lidice, but no one listened to him. It was not until the boy called the camp commander on December 23, 1945. The first thought was, “What did I do again?” Or rather, “What did they come up with again?” But this time it wasn’t a punishment. The commander took two photographs, placed them in front of the boy, and said, “Wenzel, do you know who is in the photograph? Do you know anyone there? ”
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“And she school photography. I was on it, so I showed, ‘It’s me!’ And I look at the second photo, and that was a photo of mom and dad. I say, ‘Well, that’s Mom and Dad!’ He slammed into the table and said, ‘Damn, it’s you!’ He knocked and the lady entered the office and said: ‘Venus, Vaška Hanfovic, it’s you, it’s good that you met!’ “Václav described the beginning of his journey home.
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The kind lady’s name was Josefina Napravilová. She used a car lent to her by her husband, a sugar factory, touring post-war Europe in search of lost children. She managed to return home to forty Czech girls and boys abducted by the Germans for re-education. Vaška liked her the most. He spent Christmas with her in Prague. There he also learned that he had become an orphan, but that both of his sisters had been found and returned home.
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New family
Josefina wanted to adopt the boy, but the committee of the Lidice women was against it. Eleven-year-old Václav traveled to his uncle’s mother Karel Kubel in Hřebče, Maruška and Anička were taken apart by distant relatives. He soon received his first beating in his new family. That’s when it broke out that his aunt was stealing cigarettes from the newsagent and secretly smoking. And the punishment was definitely not the last.
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They said I didn’t have to marry her because she was a bullet and I was a child from Lidice. That the state will take care of the child.
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He trained as an electrician at the Poldi Kladno smelter: he worked with miners in underground mines, then worked as an electrician in Prague at the airport. At the age of seventeen, he entered the School of Junior Officers near Pardubice. “I thought I’d go to war voluntarily to learn everything if something like this happened again,” he explains.
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Peace demonstration in June 1952 in Prague. Václav Hanf is pictured with Věra Vokata, another of Lidice’s surviving orphans.
Photo: ČTK
He enjoyed school, but only lasted two years. In Pardubice, he met the young woman Zdena Žočková, whose parents had a farm next to the barracks. It was love like a beam. So large that in April 1953 the young parents, not even twenty, gave birth to a daughter. Put it down! And forget about her mother, he called Václav the state …
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He was not allowed to finish school: a former member of the Hitler Youth cannot become a Czechoslovak officer!
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“On June 10, for the burning of Lidice … they invited me to court … They said that … she was the daughter of the kulaks and that they would be evicted to the border. That I don’t have to marry her, because she’s a bullet and I’m a child from Lidice. That become about (our) the child will take care. When I heard that, I almost cried in the end and I told them clearly that it was June 10 to realize when I had lost my parents and everything, my grandfather, my grandmother … Now that I like a girl with whom I have a daughter and that I should not marry her? ”
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Wedding photographs of Václav and Zdenka Hanf. He was nineteen, he was eighteen.
Photo: Memory of the Nation / Václav Hanf archive
Officials finally allowed the wedding, but the problems persisted. Wenceslas was not allowed to finish military school: a former member of the Hitler Youth cannot become a Czechoslovak officer! He had to unscrew the war with the auxiliary technical battalions. Fortunately, due to his destroyed knee, he moved mainly around the food: first he worked in the kitchen, later he served as a provisional chief and ended up as a company clerk.
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After the war, the young couple moved with their parents to Chodov near Karlovy Vary and lived there for several years. In the meantime, nice houses for survivors gradually grew up in the new Lidice. When it was the turn of Vaška Hanfů, some Lidice women protested against bringing a cuckoo daughter to the village. Nevertheless, the Hanfs eventually settled in Lidice, and local women eventually got used to Mrs. Zdenka: they went to see her for advice on the economy …
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In the 1970s, Vašek moved with his family – in the meantime, his sons Jaroslav and Miloslav joined his daughter Jaroslava – back to northern Bohemia. He ran a hotel in the Navarov chateau and later built a house in Bohdalovice near Velké Hamry, where he operated a guest house. There he also celebrated a diamond wedding with his Zdenička.
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Vaclav Hanf with his wedding photo.
Photo: Memory of the Nation / Václav Hanf archive
He spent his old age peacefully in the circle of a branched family. He devoted himself to his grandson and three granddaughters, and later also to five great-grandchildren. He also remained in contact with Josefina Napravilová, whom he considered his second mother.
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His passion was hunting and fishing. He died on February 18, 2017 at the age of 83. In addition to his Zdenka, he was accompanied on his last journey by friends, including Václav Zelenka. They said goodbye to him with the song The Deer Trumpet in the Mountains. The coffin, which stood the honor guard of six hunters, was decorated with a twig of needles – a symbol of the last hunt.
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The survivors and the others
- Of the 105 children from Lidice, only 17 were found after the war. Most of the others, a total of 82, were murdered in early July 1942 in Chełmno.
- Still in Kladno, two blond and blue-eyed children, Hana Špotová and Václav Zelenka, were destined to be Germanized.
- The other seven children – Marie Doležalová, Emilie Frejová, Václav Hanf, Anna Hanfová, Marie Hanfová, Eva Kubíková and Věra Vokatá – then ended up in Łódži. Most of them were adopted by German families.
- Seven babies under the age of one ended up at the German department of a children’s foundry in Prague-Krč. Six of them survived: Pavel Horešovský, Veronika Hanfová (cousin of Václav Hanf), Josef Minařík, Jiří Müller, Libuše Müllerová and Jiří Pitín.
- Seven Lidice women were pregnant at the time of the extermination of Lidice. Six of them gave birth in a secret maternity hospital set up by the Gestapo in Prague. The newborns were registered under German names. Only two survived until the end of the war: Věra Müllerová and Jaroslav Korecký. The women were transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp after giving birth. There was also the last birth and the newborn baby was murdered right after birth.
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