If I had been a boy, I would have been shot...

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The reminiscences of Jaroslava Skleničková cover the life history of one of the people born in Lidice whose fate was touched in a very cruel manner by the wiping out of the village. The Nazis carried out this massacre as a barbaric act of revenge against a quite innocent and basically selected-by-chance group of people. In June 1942, Mrs Skleničková was 16 years old, and without realizing it, she had double “good luck”. If she had been born a boy, the Nazis would have murdered her along with the other men of Lidice, and if she had been born not quite three months later, she would not have been a woman according to the Nazi machinery, but a child and in that case, there would have been little chance of her outliving the Nazi “special treatment.”