Beth Clark shares history of Lidice Massacre Feb 17
During the 1950s and ‘60s, Beth Cernota Clark “grew accustomed to picking up scraps of Czech from her parents and grandparents, whose World War II memories were still fresh in their minds and conversations.” In 2017, as a senior lecturer in journalism at Texas State University, she earned a rare opportunity to research the story behind some of the hushed conversations that permeated her home and the larger immigrant community near Chicago. She will share some of those stories with the Rotary Club of San Marcos on Wednesday, February 17 at noon.
“Growing up in a bilingual household doesn’t always mean you understand what’s being said, especially when English is the focus at school,” Clark said. Her grandparents emigrated from Bohemia and Moravia — what is now the Czech Republic — at the turn of the 20th century.
“Lidice,” “Heydrich,” and “Gestapo” were keywords in launching her faculty research project, which she continues to pursue after retirement. Several visits to the village of Lidice, near Prague, have enabled her to interview “child survivors,” now in their 70s and 80s, and to explore the memorial grounds and archives. The survivors, who live in “new” Lidice, are victims of Nazi atrocities committed on June 10, 1942, when Hitler ordered his troops to destroy the Roman Catholic village of Lidice and to erase it from all maps and memory.
Clark shares this history of the Lidice Massacre with San Marcos Rotary online via Zoom.
Non-Rotarians are welcome to sit in on the meeting. They can email smtxrotary@gmail.com to request the Zoom link.