With the very air around us still crackling with political energy, the Spencertown Academy will host a live performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem, "The Murder of Lidice" this Friday night. On June 10, 1942, the German government announced that it had destroyed the small village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, killing every man and fifty-two women, then driving the surviving women into concentration camps and the children into so-called educational institutions. Lidice, they proudly proclaimed, was now forever blotted from memory. Their justification: retaliation for an unproved suspicion that the village had sheltered the murderers of Heydrich the Hangman.
Two days after the news of Lidice reached America, the Writers’ War Board, in an effort to keep the name and memory of Lidice alive, pressed Edna St. Vincent Millay to write a poem about it. She answered with a long, dramatic narrative, “The Murder of Lidice,” first published in Life and Harper's magazines, then days later performed live (as intended by the poet) over NBC radio. The film director Douglas Sirk, who had emigrated from Germany the year before, was given his first chance behind the camera, directing John Carradine (below) in an adaptation of the Millay poem, renamed, Hitler's Madman. Spencertown Academy will screen the film at the conclusion of the reading.
Meanwhile, at Steepletop, the one-time home of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, now a National Historic Landmark and headquarters of The Millay Society, the current exhibition is "The Murder of Lidice, a Poem and Political Statement." Spencertown AcademyRoute 203, Spencertown; 518.392.3693 Friday, November 7, at 7 p.m. Admission: free SteepletopEast Hill Road, Austerlitz; 518.392.3362 Saturday - Monday 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.; Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. Closed Thursdays
