Someone Named Eva

Someone Named Eva is based on true events that happened in Czechoslovakia (now known as two separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and Poland in the late 1930s. In 1939, Czechoslovakia surrendered to the Third Reich, another name for Nazi Germany. By 1942, the Czech government in hiding was based out of London and sent seven parachutists to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi official in Prague. On May 27, 1942, the parachutists rolled a grenade under Heydrich’s car. The grenade splinters lodged in Heydrich’s legs and lower back led to an infection of sepsis that killed him a week later (Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Lidice: The Annihilation of a Czech Town.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022).

In retaliation, Nazi soldiers punished the Czech people by destroying the town of Lidice, which is Milada’s hometown in the story. This devastating event affected the 503 inhabitants of Lidice and is known as the Lidice massacre. On the night of June 10, 1942, Nazi soldiers shot and killed all males over age 15. The soldiers made the remaining 300+ women and children wait in a school in Kladno for three days, just as Wolf wrote. Then, children determined worthy of Germanization were sent to training centers, while the women and other children were sent to concentration camps. The Nazis then leveled all the homes and buildings in Lidice.

Nazi media took the footage from these events and broadcast them publicly, making an example of Lidice and hoping to subdue the underground resistance in Czechoslovakia. The events did indeed break the resistance in Czechoslovakia, but it also spurred Allied forces to double down their efforts in the war. In response to the footage, Frank Knox, secretary of the US Navy, said, “If future generations ask us what we were fighting for in this war, we shall tell them the story of Lidice” (Solly, Meilan. “The Lost Children of the Lidice Massacre.” Smithsonian Magazine, September 12, 2018).

The Germanization of foreign children was a plan implemented by Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, known as the second most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler, was the high-ranking Nazi official who led the Holocaust. Under Himmler’s orders, foreign children who matched the specifications of the Aryan race were separated from their families and forced to undergo extensive physical testing. Those who did not pass the physical and intelligence tests were returned to their families if they were young or sent to concentration camps if they were older. Those who passed the exams were sent to Lebensborn centers for training like the facility portrayed in Someone Named Eva. The SS Lebensborn Association was responsible for reeducating these foreign children and reprogramming them with German ideals, attempting to cleanse them of their previous culture. When the authorities of these schools deemed the children ready, they were adopted into German families, where they lived for the remainder of the war.

After the war, multiple organizations—like United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association (UNRRA)—were involved in returning the stolen children to their original homes and families. Members of these organizations had to discern whether the children were truly German. This was a challenging task because children’s birth certificates had been lost or destroyed, children’s original families had been killed, and many of the children didn’t remember that they had a birth family to return to. In fact, younger children had no memories of their birth families and considered their German families to be their own. (“Stolen Children: Interview with Gitta Sereny.” Talk, 1999, reprinted in Jewish Virtual Library.)

However, there were many cases where children were old enough to remember being taken from their families. These older children often had to relearn their original languages and work hard to assimilate back into the culture that was stolen from them. There are still many children who remember being taken but were never able to find their families. In 2017, German broadcasting platform DW and Polish news platform Interia partnered to try and piece together what happened to many of these children. The aim is to help the children, who are now elderly, reconstruct their past and potentially find the missing links to their stories.