A dramatic story of a woman who has personally met the madness of Himmler's plan called Lebensborn, has been in the recent weeks shot in the Šumperk area and in Zinkovy near Pilsen by Milan Cieslar, a film director. The film is being produced according to script by Vladimír Körner and it cannot hide the fact it has been written by a narrator with a sense for detail and with perfect knowledge of fates, the lives of which had been literally turned upside down by the odor of ideology.

It would not be Körner if individuality and the strength of fate did not shine through his stigma of war, reminding Charon's boat in the last script. Its instability is unpredictable. Far from the roar of guns, a pilgrimage of a barely adult Gretka Weiser unwinds, who has been selected, similarly as thousands of Polish, Norwegian or Belgian women, for a opprobrious ritual conception of a future descendant of Vaterland. In contrast to Styron's Sophia Zawistowska, whose contact with Lebensborn would mean redemption for her son from a concentration camp, Gretka is only a future mother, who against her will gets in the net of the Higher Order and Himmler's mystery. With this recrudescent picture Körner has completed its view of the land of war, and chose a characteristic silent zone for its tuning. In this very zone, people tried to model their future world, whose victory would mean exactly that what The Spring of Life opened in its times.

"I actually started with the first film called Reservation Ticket with No Return," says Vladimír Körner. "From that a novella came into being, called Splinters in the Grass, which was my debut. It is a story of a little girl, taken to German for re-education. She then returns and fails to recognize her mother. The mother make her Czech by force, and the girl emigrates in 1953 to the West again. Reservation Ticket with No Return was alwo my first film that was shot in North Moravia. Jirina Šejbalová played excellent in the film, as well as Karla Chadimová played the adult daughter. From today's point of view it is actually an entry in the whole issue in which I have continued. Cuckoo in a Dark Forest with Oleg Tabakov in the main role followed. That was already a story of pubescent girl who refuses to be re-educated although she is forced to in a German family. Now it is a third young girl from Grullich, with an order to give birth to a strong German child. The circle is closed."

According to Catrine Clay and Michael Leapman, who in 1995 wrote a documentary testimony of the Master Race (Nazi Germany and the Lebensborn Experiment, published in English by BBC, 1994), Himmler's and his defendants' efforts to bring the homes of Lebensborn to a state which at least on the outside helps poorly situated mothers. Influenced by concepts of the Thule company and the Company for Race Hygiene, already on 12 December 1935 they founded the Lebensborn company (Spring of Life) and immediately made it subordinate to the SS. Himmler in person supervised selecting houses with a clean environment and air, absurdly pleaded for men's fertility in the SS and also for obligations, which will arise from such orders beside matrimonial relationships. The Lebensborn homes (the nearest was located from 1941 in Velké Losiny in the North Moravia area) housed not only married women but also single girls with prospect of a good provision and with a promise of official confidentiality provided that they meet project conditions. Of course, this did not only apply to them alone.

"We lived in Uhřičice by Kojetín", says Vladimír Körner. "I remember that some time in 1943 mobile X-ray vehicles came into the village, which under the excuse of TBC prevention served German doctors to examine the kids. My memory of a silver bus from that time was my first impulse for the last script. Moravia, namely the Haná area, was a literal pasture for Hitler according to trustworthy documents, as compared to the German war population there was a lot of healthy and blond children who did not always have to live on rations. In the Third Reich they could count on them for the future in case of victory."

Have you ever met girls from Lebensborn?
"Only ex-post. For instance in Jihlava - south Bohemia- where there was the Adolf Hitler Haus. Hitler himself designed lattices and tables for the house. Upstairs there was a washing room with a ceiling covered with bull blood. A very Spartan place such as at order knight castles in Germany. Above the entrance there is still a Lebensborn mark visible, the runes of life. For Hitler a special road was built to the house, which had not any sexual undermeaning but it just added more mystery to the whole place. The Leader sometimes came anonymously and mingled with the young. Some girls were forcibly selected to stay in the house, some came because of ideals and others because they got work there or money for their newborns. Using preserved document, German Stasi even used children of Lebensborn and sent them as false descendants for espionage to Norway. That country was very much impacted by Himmler's project of the Arian race, similarly as Lithuania and Latvia. However, most camps were located around the Silesian region."

How did you create your script?
"I started to write some time in 1992. Now the film got support, mainly thanks to its director Cieslar, who has taken the topic as his fatal matter. We have worked on it together for the past three years and nowadays we go and shoot already. The film starts with aboriginal roots of Gretka, which are places under Králický Sněžník. There is a village of Květná u Stříbrnic, where we have shot recently. With our Lebensborn staff we have also worked in a spinning-mill of Sudkov, which gave me a double pleasure. It reminded me of my grandfather, who used to be a supervisor in that mill, and I found a perfect atmosphere for my film. So far we have completed our shooting in Nové Losiny. At the same time there was some shooting in Zinkovy near Pilsen and before that in the caves of Mladeč as well, where we managed to catch one of the symbols of the film, which is fire. But not even the last meters of the film shot suggest that we want to picture cruelty. Of course it is the red line of the film but without gun shots and drastic elements that might relate to it. We have ended the shooting in sand dunes of Leba near the Leborg town in northern Poland, which is also the place of the last Gretka's prayer."

Whom will we see in Spring of Life?
"The main boy's role is played by a Pole Michal Sieczkowski. Monika Hilmerová is Slovak, she has got the role of Gretka. Her mother is played by Bozidara Turzonová, Gretka's teacher is played by Josef Somr. Attention should also be paid to the Chief of Šumperk Gestapo, which is Vítězslav Jandák. During execution the script requires changes and metamorphoses and young people play for life in the film. I am glad that the story of Gretka has appealed to them."

Maybe it is because a man's life is jeopardized.
"This does not require war only, I have never written about war directly. The only exception is Blind Shoulder, where the original inspiration came from my father's autobiography. I have always inclined to what remained after the war. To those mental scars. I myself escaped from the Sudeten to Moravia in a prenatal state and then we returned to the north again but with my father's tin coffin. Then add the banishing of Germans and other things to that. I would say that man perceived the monstrosities as if by his left eye since one had his own children problems. Pictures of that time have remained and I still have them very deep inside myself. Therefore, there is no reason not to write about them."

Körner's Lebensborn, diametrically different from Hrabal's novel sequence from a forest town near Dieín, where a waiter called Ditie serves pregnant German women, brings in its whole a extraordinarily interesting view of the machine of ideology, which had to fall as it was wrong from its very foundations. However, not even nearly 60 years after the war have all its secrets been uncovered. The last Körner's piece uncovers one of them with such a visible anxiety that we have to leaf through pages of the script to be convinced by the story that it took place in 1941-1945. It contains a challenge as well as a historical reminiscence. We could see the film already in the first months of next year.