THE MURDER OF LIDICE at the Spencertown Academy Carole Osterink ccSCOOP Editor On Friday, November 7, Spencertown Academy offered an evening of poetry and film, in conjunction with the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society’s current exhibition at Steepletop in Austerlitz, The Murder of Lidice. A cast of local actors, headed up by J. Peter Bergman, Director of the Society, and including Kate Gulliver, Johnna Murray, Sybille Baier, and Paul Murphy, performed The Murder of Lidice, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1942 radio play in verse. The performance was to be followed by a screening of Douglas Sirk’s 1943 film Hitler’s Madman, which was based in part on Millay’s play and featured John Carradine, Patricia Morison, Alan Curtis, and Ava Gardner, in a small, uncredited role.

A flyer announcing The Murder of Lidice exhibition at Steepletop asked provocatively, “How could a single poem nearly destroy a poet’s reputation and career?” How indeed?  Millay had been a strong pacifist during World War I. In the 1920s, at the height of her popularity, she joined a writers’ crusade in defense of the alleged anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

In the late 1930s, however, the rise of fascism and her fear for people and places in Europe that she loved caused a shift in her politics. Millay took part in forums promoting American involvement in World War II and began writing propaganda poetry in support of the Allied war effort in Europe. In 1942, she was commissioned by the Writers’ War Board to write The Murder of Lidice about the slaughter of a Czechoslovakian village by the Nazis. The brutal massacre was retribution for the assassination, by the resistance, of the notorious Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, referred to in the play as “Heydrich the Hangman.”

The Murder of Lidice, read by the actor Paul Muni, was broadcast in the United States over NBC Radio on October 19, 1942. It was also broadcast all over Europe by short wave radio. The play is credited with changing America’s perception of the war in Europe and shifting the nation’s attention from Japan and the war in the Pacific to what was happening in Europe.

Critics have described much of Millay’s World War II poetry as “vapid,” but that is certainly not a word that applies to The Murder of Lidice. A more appropriate adjective—for the play and for the performance at Spencertown Academy—might be “strident.” After creating an idyllic picture of the centuries old village of Lidice and the simple life of the people who lived there, Millay exercises no restraint in describing the depraved brutality of the Nazis and the atrocities they committed. Then, as if describing the horror were not enough to get the message across to the American public, she added, in a final revision to the piece made just before the initial Paul Muni broadcast, an ending designed to drive the point home:

Careless America, crooning a tune!—
Catch him! Catch him! And stop him soon!
Never let him come here!

Think a moment: Are we immune?

Oh, my country, so foolish and dear,
Scornful America, crooning a tune,
Think. Think: Are we immune?—
Catch him! Catch him! And stop him soon!
Never let him come here!

Ask yourself, ask yourself: What have we done?—
Who, after all, are we?—
That we should sit at ease in the sun,
The only country, the only one,
Unmolested and free?

Catch him! Catch him! Do not wait!
Or will you wait, and share the fate
Of the village of Lidice?
Or will you wait, and let him destroy
The Village of Lidice, Illinois?
Oh, catch him! Catch him, and stop him soon!
Never let him come here!

Millay said later of her play in verse: "It has some good lines, but not many, and not very good. This piece should be allowed to die along the war which provoked it." There’s something to be said for that attitude, but for those of us who weren’t alive during the war years or the years that led up to it, The Murder of Lidice provides insight into the period and into what distinguishes World War II from all previous and subsequent wars in the collective mind and memory of the American people. The Murder of Lidice presents, as Bergman says, “a very vivid and clear historical look at the war and how the Nazis were treating people. It’s a history lesson of sorts and also a definitive piece of propaganda writing.”

The opportunity to compare how the story of brutality and death was treated in different media—narrative verse and film—was lost when the DVD copy of Hitler’s Madman stopped, lurched forward and continued without sound, and then stopped again, making this writer decide that mentally processing one account of the atrocities at Lidice was enough for one evening.

The special exhibition about The Murder of Lidice, funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, continues through November 26 at the Ellis-Studio Gallery at Steepletop, 436 East Hill Road, Austerlitz.