In the summer of 1945 7-year-old Václav Zelenka was admitted to first grade of the Bühlau school in Quohrener Straße under the name of Rolf Wagner.
Václav Zelenka had been abducted from the Czech village of Lidice three years earlier. On the evening of 9 June 1942 German SS and police units had surrounded his home village, shot his father with all other men from Lidice and deported his mother with the women of the village to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The massacre was one of several “acts of retaliation” for an assassination committed by Czech resistance fighters who, days earlier, had killed the German occupation authorities’ representative highest in rank, Heydrich.

Out of the children of the village who had been separated from their mothers, the SS chose nine who were considered eligible for “Germanisation”. The remaining 81 children were gassed at Kulmhof extermination camp; the youngest among them having only just turned one year old shortly before. Four-year-old Václav received a new name; three years later the educators of the SS organisation “Lebensborn” (literally “Spring of life”) believed to have moulded him into a German boy. In early February 1945 he was adopted by the Wagners, a married Dresden couple. In the basement of their residence in the Bühlau neighbourhood he experienced the heavy air raids on Dresden.

It was only two years after the end of the NS dictatorship in May 1947 that his true identity was discovered. The now nine-year-old boy was returned to Lidice and expected there by his mother who had survived the incarceration at the concentration camp.

Marked on 18 November 2013