Swoon used a small piece of footage from the documentary Lidice Lives by James Truswell, as well as a loop of his own images, for this memorial film. “Repetition was the key word here,” he notes. He was moved to search for a poem to envideo after reading a book about Lidice, and discovered “November 1” by the Belgian poet Bernard Dewulf, also available in an English translation by Sapphire/Ramona Lofton. Even before that, though, his first step had been to compose the music later incorporated into the soundtrack.

From the Wikipedia:

Lidice is a village in the Czech Republic just northwest of Prague. It is built near the site of the previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On 10 June 1942, all 173 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered. Another 11 men who were not in the village were arrested and murdered soon afterwards along with several others already under arrest. Several hundred women and over 100 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children considered racially suitable for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were gassed to death. After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.

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Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

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