HHhH Бине Лоран

249

It goes without saying that he was tortured horribly. Apparently, they showed him his mother’s head floating in a jar. “You see this box, Ata…” He must have remembered Valk’s words. But a box has no mother.

250

And now I am Gabk. What do they say? I am inhabiting my character. I see myself arm in arm with Libena, walking through liberated Prague, people laughing and speaking Czech and offering me cigarettes. We are married now, she’s expecting a baby. I’ve been prooted to captain. President Bene is leading a reunified Czechoslovakia. Jan comes to see us with Anna, behind the wheel of the latest-model koda. He wears his cap backwards. We go to drink a beer in a kaviaren by the riverside. Smoking English cigarettes, we laugh as we think back to the time of the struggle. Remember the crypt? God, it was cold! It’s a Sunday. The river flows by. I hug my wife. Josef comes to join us, and Opalka with his Moravian fiance—the one he used to talk about all the time. The Moravecs are there, too, and the colonel, who offers me a cigar. Bene brings us sausages, and flowers for the girls. He wants to make a speech in our honor. Jan and I plead with him: no, no, not another speech! Libena laughs and teases me gently. She calls me her hero. Bene begins his speech in the church at Vyehrad—it’s cool in there, and I’m dressed in my wedding suit. I hear people come into the church behind me. I hear Nezval recite a poem. It’s a Jewish story, of the Golem, of Faust on Charles Square, with golden keys and the shop signs in Nerudova Street, and numbers on a wall that form my date of birth until the wind scatters them…

I have no idea what time it is.

I am not Gabk and I never will be. At the last second, I resist the temptation of the interior monologue and in doing so perhaps save myself from ridicule at this crucial point. The gravity of the situation is no excuse. I know perfectly well what time it is, and I am wide-awake.

It is 4:00 a.m. I am not asleep in the stone recesses reserved for dead monks in the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

In the street, black shapes begin their furtive ballet once again. Except we are no longer in Lidice, but in the heart of Prague. It is now much too late for regrets. Covered trucks arrive from all directions, forming the shape of a star, with the church at its center. On a control panel, we see the luminous streaks of vehicles slowly converging on the target, but stopping before they meet. The two main stopping points are the bank of the Vltava and Charles Square, at either end of Resslova Street. Headlights and engines are switched off. Shock troops clatter out from beneath the covers on the trucks. An SS guard stands at his post before each doorway, each sewer opening. Heavy machine guns are placed on the roofs. Prudently, night flees the scene. The first glimmers of dawn have already begun to lighten the sky because summer time has not yet been invented and Prague—though slightly farther west than, say, Vienna—is sufficiently eastern for these cold, clear mornings to come while the city is still sleeping. The block of houses is already surrounded when Commissioner Pannwitz arrives, escorted by a small group of his agents. The interpreter accompanying him breathes in the fragrant smell of the flower beds in Charles Square (and to still be in a job after allowing Mrs. Moravec to commit suicide, he must be one hell of an interpreter). Pannwitz is in charge of the whole operation; this is both an honor and a heavy responsibility. Above all, there must be no repeat of the fiasco of May 28, that unbelievable fuckup, which—thank God—had nothing to do with him. If all goes well, this will be the crowning glory of his career; if, on the other hand, the operation ends with anything other than the arrests or the deaths of the terrorists, he will be in deep trouble. Everyone is playing for high stakes today, even on the German side, where a lack of results can easily look like sabotage to the leaders—all the more so when they have to conceal their own errors or quench their thirst for blood (and here both factors are in play). Scapegoats at all costs—that could be the Reich’s motto. So Pannwitz spares no effort to keep himself in his bosses’ good books, and who can blame him? He is a professional cop and he will proceed methodically. He has given his men strict instructions. Absolute silence. Several security cordons. A very tight dragnet of the area. Nobody to fire without his authorization. We need them alive. Not that anyone will hold it against him if he happens to kill them, but an enemy captured alive brings the promise of ten new arrests. The dead don’t talk. Although, in a way, the Moravec woman’s corpse told them a few things. Does Pannwitz snigger quietly when he thinks this? Now that the time has finally come to arrest the assassins, who have been making fools of the Reich police for three weeks, he must be feeling a little nervous. After all, he has no idea what’s waiting for him inside. He sends a man to get the church door open. At this instant, nobody knows that the silence that reigns over Prague will be broken in only a few minutes. The agent rings the doorbell. Time passes. At last, the hinges turn. A sleepy sacristan appears in the doorway. He is hit and handcuffed before he even has time to open his mouth. But they do still have to explain to him the objective of this morning’s visit. They wish to see the church. The interpreter translates. The group crosses a vestibule, a second door is opened, and they enter the nave. The men in black spread out like spiders. Except that they don’t climb the walls—only the echo of their footsteps does that, ringing out and ricocheting off the high stone surfaces. They search everywhere but find nobody. The only place they haven’t yet searched is the gallery over the nave. Pannwitz spots a spiral staircase behind a locked gate. He demands the key from the sacristan, who swears he doesn’t have it. Pannwitz orders the lock smashed with a rifle butt. Just as the gate is opened, a round (perhaps slightly oblong) object rolls down the stairs. Hearing the metal chiming on the steps, Pannwitz understands. I’m sure he does. He understands that he’s found the parachutists’ lair, that they are hiding in the gallery above, that they are armed, and that they are not going to give themselves up. The grenade explodes. A curtain of smoke falls inside the church and then the Stens enter the action. One of the Nazi agents—the most zealous of the lot, according to the interpreter—begins to yell. Pannwitz immediately orders the retreat, but his men, blinded and disoriented, just run around shooting in all directions, caught in the cross fire from high and low. The battle of the church has begun. Clearly, the visitors were not prepared for this. Perhaps they thought it would be easy? After all, the smell of their leather raincoats is usually enough to petrify their prey. So the element of surprise is on the defenders’ side. Somehow the Gestapo gather up their wounded and manage to evacuate. The shooting from both sides stops suddenly. Pannwitz sends in an SS squadron, who receive the same welcome. Up above, the invisible marksmen know exactly what they’re doing. Perfectly positioned to cover every angle in the nave, they take their time, aim carefully, shoot sparingly, and hit their targets more often than not. Each burst of gunfire is answered with an enemy scream. The narrow, twisting staircase is as good as the most solid barricade for barring access to the gallery. The second attack ends in a second withdrawal. Pannwitz realizes there is no chance of taking them alive. To add to the atmosphere of chaos, someone orders the machine gunners posted on the roof opposite to open fire. The MG42s smash the windows to pieces.

In the gallery, three men are showered in a rain of stained glass. Yes, only three men—Kubi of Anthropoid, Opalka of Out Distance, and Bublik of Bioscope—but they know exactly what they have to do: bar access to the staircase (Opalka is stuck with that job), spend as little ammunition as possible, and kill as many Nazis as they can. Outside, their assailants are growing wild with impatience. When the machine guns go silent, the next wave surges into the nave. Pannwitz yells: “Attacke! Attacke!” Short, judicious bursts of fire are enough to push them back. The Germans rush into the church and immediately rush out again, squealing like puppies. Between the two attacks, the German machine guns spit out long, heavy bursts of fire, eating into the stoneand shredding everything else. Kubi and his two comrades—unable to return fire, or to do anything but wait for the storm to pass—protect themselves as best they can, hiding behind thick columns. Luckily for them, the SS squadrons can’t expose themselves to this covering fire either, so the MG42s neutralize the attackers just as much as they do the defenders. The situation is extremely precarious for the three parachutists, but as minutes turn into hours, they continue to hold out.

Karl Hermann Frank arrives at the scene. He’d been thinking, perhaps a little naively, that everything would be over by now. Instead, he is stunned to discover the most unbelievable bedlam on the streets, with Pannwitz sweating in his civilian suit, loosening his tie, and yelling, “Attacke! Attacke!” The assaults crash against the church like waves, one after another. You can see the relief on the faces of the injured when they’re dragged from this hell and taken to the medical center. Frank’s face, by contrast, looks anything but relieved. The sky is blue, it’s a beautiful day, but the thunder of weaponry must have woken the entire population. Who knows what they’ll be saying about this in town? Things are not looking good. As is traditional in a crisis, the boss gives his subordinate a good dressing-down. The terrorists must be neutralized immediately. One hour later, bullets are still whistling from all directions. Pannwitz screams ever louder: “Attacke! Attacke!” But the SS have now realized that they are never going to take the staircase, so they change their tactics. The nest has to be cleaned out from below. Covering fire, assault, fusillade, grenades tossed upward until the most skillful (or the luckiest) grenadier hits the bull’s-eye. After three hours of battle, a series of explosions finally brings silence to the gallery. For a long time, nobody dares move. Finally, it’s decided to send someone up to see. The soldier ordered to climb the staircase waits, resigned yet anxious, for the burst of gunfire that will kill him. But it doesn’t come. He enters the gallery. When the smoke clears, he discovers three motionless bodies: one a corpse, the other two wounded and unconscious. Opalka is dead, but Bublik and Kubi are still breathing. Pannwitz calls an ambulance. He never expected to get this chance; now he must take advantage of it. The men must be saved so they can be interrogated. One has broken legs and the other’s in equally bad shape. The ambulance tears through the streets of Prague, its siren screaming, but by the time it reaches the hospital Bublik is dead. Twenty minutes later, Kubi, too, succumbs to his wounds.

Kubi is dead. I wish I didn’t have to write that. I would have liked to get to know him better. If only I could have saved him. According to witnesses, there was a boarded-up door at the end of the gallery that led to the neighboring buildings, and which might have allowed the three men to escape. If only they’d gone through that door! History is the only true casualty: you can reread it as much as you like, but you can never rewrite it. Whatever I do, whatever I say, I will never bring Jan Kubi back to life—brave, heroic Jan Kubi, the man who killed Heydrich. It has given me no pleasure at all to write this scene. Long, laborious weeks I’ve spent on it, and for what? Three pages of comings and goings in a church, and three deaths. Kubi, Opalka, Bublik—they died as heroes, but they died all the same. I don’t even have time to mourn them, because history waits for no man.

The Germans search through the rubble and find nothing. They dump the body of the third man on the pavement and bring urda along to identify him. The traitor lowers his head and mumbles: “Opalka.” Pannwitz is delighted. He’s struck lucky. He presumes that the two men in the ambulance are the two assassins, whose names urda gave up during the interrogation: Jozef Gabk and Jan Kubi. He has no idea that Gabk is just beneath his feet.

When the shooting stopped, Gabk realized his friend was dead. None of them would ever let the Gestapo take them alive. Now he waits alongside Valk and his two other comrades—Jan Hruby of Operation Bioscope and Jaroslav Svarc of Operation Tin, the latter having just been sent by London to assassinate Emanuel Moravec, the collaborationist minister—for the Germans either to burst into the crypt or to leave without having flushed them out.

Above them the search goes on, but still they haven’t found anything. The church looks like it’s been hit by an earthquake, and the trapdoor to the crypt is concealed beneath a carpet that nobody thinks to lift. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, you are far less likely to find it. And of course the Germans’ nerves have been sorely tested. Everybody thinks that there is probably nothing more to do here: the mission is over and Pannwitz is about to suggest to Frank that they pack up and go home when one of his men finds something and brings it to him. It’s a piece of clothing—I don’t even know if it’s a jacket, a sweater, a shirt, or a pair of socks—that he discovered in a corner of the church. The policeman’s instinct is immediately on alert. I don’t know how he decides that this item of clothing does not belong to one of the three men they’ve just killed in the gallery, but in any case he orders the search to be continued.

It is after seven o’clock when they find the trapdoor.

Gabk, Valk, and their two comrades are trapped like rats. Their hiding place is now their prison, and everything points toward it becoming their tomb. But until then they’re going to make it a bunker. The trapdoor opens. As soon as the legs of an SS stormtrooper appear, they each release a short burst of gunfire. This is like their signature—a demonstration of the cool blood that flows through their veins. There’s screaming and the legs disappear. Their situation is hopeless, but at the same time quite safe, in a way, at least in the short term—safer than the situation in the gallery had been. Kubi and his two comrades had the benefit of a position overlooking the nave, which allowed them to dominate their attackers. Here, it’s the opposite, because the enemy is coming from above, but the entrance is so narrow that the SS have to come down one by one—and that gives the defenders plenty of time to shoot them one after another. It’s the same principle as at Thermopylae, if you like, except that Leonidas’s task has already been accomplished by Kubi. So, protected by thick stone walls, Gabk, Valk, Hruby, and Svarc do at least have time—to think, if nothing else. How can they get out of there? Above them, they hear: “Give yourselves up. Nothing bad will happen to you.” The only way out of the crypt is this trapdoor. There is also a kind of horizontal vent in the wall, about ten feet above the floor: they’ve got a ladder, so they could reach it, but it’s too narrow for a man to pass through, and besides, it would only take them out to Resslova Street, which is crawling with hundreds of SS stormtroopers. “You will be treated as prisoners of war.” There are also a few steps leading to an old, boarded-up door, but even if they did manage to break it down, it only leads to the nave—and that, too, is swarming with Germans. “They told me to tell you that you have to give up. So I’ve told you. They said that nothing bad will happen to you, that you’ll be treated as prisoners of war.” The parachutists recognize the voice of Father Petrek, the priest who welcomed them and hid them in his church. One of them replies: “We are Czechs! We will never give ourselves up, you hear? Never! Never!” This is almost certainly not Gabk, who would have specified: “Czechs and Slovaks.” In my opinion it’s Valk. But another voice repeats “Never!” and follows it with a burst of gunfire. That seems to me more Gabk’s style. (Although the truth is that I don’t have a clue.)

Anyway, the endgame has reached a stalemate. Nobody can enter the crypt, and nobody can leave it. Outside, loudspeakers repeat the same words in a loop: “Give yourelves up and come out with your hands in the air. If you do not give yourselves up, we will blow up the whole church and you will be buried in the rubble.” Each announcement is met by a salvo of bullets from the crypt. Even if the Resistance is often deprived of its ability to speak, it can still express itself with a marvelous eloquence. Outside, the ranks of SS are asked to volunteer to go into the crypt. Nobody blinks. The commander repeats his request, more threateningly. A few soldiers step forward, pale-faced. Those who didn’t move are automatically volunteered. Another man is selected to descend through the trapdoor. He gets the same treatment: bullets in the legs—a bloodcurdling scream; another crippled superman. If the parachutists have plenty of ammunition, this could go on for a long time.

The truth is that I don’t want to finish this story. I would like to suspend this moment for eternity, when the four men decide not to surrender to their fate but to dig a tunnel. Beneath the sort of fanlight/vent thing, with God knows what tools, they notice that the wall—which is below ground level—is made of bricks that crumble and come loose easily. Perhaps there is a way after all… perhaps, if we can dig through the stone… Behind the fragile brick wall, they find soft earth, and this makes them redouble their efforts. How far until they reach a pipe, or a sewer, or some kind of path leading to the river? Sixty feet? Thirty feet? Less? There are seven hundred SS outside, fingers on triggers, paralyzed or overexcited by nerves, by their fear of these four men, by the prospect of having to dislodge these enemies who are entrenched, resolute, and not at all intimidated, these enemies who know how to fight. They don’t even know how many of them there are! (As if there might be a whole battalion down there! The crypt is less than fifty feet long.) Outside, Pannwitz barks orders and men run in all directions. Inside, they dig with the energy of the damned. Perhaps they are just struggling for the sake of struggling, and nothing more. Perhaps nobody actually believes in this insane, delirious, Hollywood-style escape plan. But I believe in it. The four men dig away. Do they take turns while they listen to the fire engines’ sirens in the street? Or perhaps there weren’t any sirens. I’ll have another look at the testimony of the fireman who took part in that terrible day. Gabk puts everything into digging the tunnel. He’s sweating now, having been so cold for days. I’m sure the tunnel was his idea: he’s a natural optimist. And I’m also sure that he’s digging now: he can’t stand being inactive. He wouldn’t just sit there and wait for death, not without doing something, not without trying something. Kubi will not die in vain—let nobody say that Kubi died in vain. Had they already begun digging the tunnel during the assault on the nave, taking advantage of the noise to cover the sound of their pickax? I don’t know that either. How is it possible to know so much and yet so little about people, a story, historical events that you’ve lived with for years? But, deep down, I know they’re going to make it. I can feel it. They’re going to get out of this trap. They are going to escape from Pannwitz’s clutches. Frank will be mad as hell and there’ll be films made about them.

Where is that bloody fireman’s testimony?

Today is May 27, 2008. When the firemen arrive, about 8:00 a.m., they see the SS everywhere and a corpse on the pavement. No one has thought to move Opalka’s body. The firemen listen as they are told what they have to do. It was Pannwitz’s brilliant idea: to smoke them out, and—if that doesn’t work—to drown them. None of the firemen want this job. Among their ranks, one hisses: “If you want that done, don’t look at us.” The head fireman chokes with anger: “Who said that?” But who would have become a fireman to end up lumbered with such a job? So a volunteer is chosen to smash off the iron bars that protect the vent. They fall after a few blows and Frank applauds. And thus a new battle begins around this horizontal orifice, barely three feet long and ten inches high; this black hole that, for the Germans, seems to open onto the unknown and the prospect of death; this shaft of light for the men in the crypt, which also signifies death. This small opening is now the one square on the chessboard coveted by all the pieces remaining in the game. Occupy this square, and you have a crucial positional advantage in an endgame where white—because, in this particular game, it’s black who moved first and who holds the initiative—will stage a heroic, against-all-odds defense.

May 28, 2008. The firemen manage to slide their firehose through the vent. The hose is connected to a fire hydrant, and the pumps are activated. Water pours through the opening.

May 29, 2008. The water begins to rise. Gabk, Valk, and their two comrades have wet feet. As soon as a shadow approaches the vent, they shoot. But the water keeps rising.

May 30, 2008. The water is rising, but very slowly. Frank is getting impatient. The Germans toss tear-gas grenades into the crypt to smoke out its occupants, but it doesn’t work, because the grenades fall in the water. Why didn’t they try this before? It’s a mystery. I don’t think you should rule out the possibility that they are acting, as is often the case, in a rushed and disorderly way. Pannwitz seems to me the kind of man who thinks things through carefully, but I suppose he may not be in charge of all the military operations. And perhaps he, too, gives in to panic? Gabk and his friends have wet feet, but at this rate they will die of old age before they’re drowned.

June 1, 2008. Frank is extremely nervous. The more time passes, the more he fears that the parachutists will find a way of escaping. The water could even help them if they manage to find a leak, because, obviously, the crypt is not exactly watertight. Inside, they’re getting organized. One is in charge of gathering up the grenades and throwing them back outside. Another keeps digging unrelentingly in the tunnel. A third uses a ladder to push the firehose away from the vent. And the other one lets off bursts of gunfire whenever someone approaches. On the other side of the stone wall, soldiers and firemen, bent double, have to keep putting the firehose back in place while avoiding the spray of bullets.

June 2, 2008. The Germans bring a gigantic searchlight to dazzle the men in the crypt, so they can’t aim properly. But before they’ve even had time to switch it on, a burst of gunfire, like an ironic punctuation mark, puts it out of service.

June 3, 2008. The Germans keep sliding the hose into the crypt, to drown them or smoke them out, but each time the parachutists use the ladder like a telescopic arm to push it back. I don’t understand why the Germans couldn’t put the firehose through the trapdoor in the nave, which is still—as far as I’m aware—wide open. Perhaps the hose is too short, or they can’t get into the nave with the kind of equipment required? Or perhaps it’s an unlikely providence that is depriving them of all tactical lucidity?

June 4, 2008. The water is up to their knees. Outside, urda and Ata Moravec are brought to the vent. Ata refuses to speak, but urda shouts through the opening: “Give yourselves up, lads! They’ve treated me well. You’ll be prisoners of war—it’ll be all right.” Gabk and Valk recognize his voice; now they know who betrayed them. They reply in the usual way: with a burst of gunfire. Ata stands with his head lowered. His face is swollen and he has the absent look of a young man with one foot in the land of the dead.

June 5, 2008. After about ten feet, the earth in the tunnel becomes hard. Do the parachutists stop digging so they can concentrate on shooting? I can’t believe that. They go at it even harder. They’ll dig with their fingernails if they have to.

June 9, 2008. Frank can bear it no longer. Pannwitz tries to think. There must be some other way in. They used to put dead monks in the crypt. How did they get the bodies down thre? Inside the church, his men continue their search. They clear away the rubble. They pull up the carpets. They demolish the altar. They tap on the stone walls. They search high and low.

June 10, 2008. And they find something else. Beneath the altar, there’s a heavy slab that sounds hollow when you tap it. Pannwitz sends for the firemen and orders them to break the slab. A sectional drawing at this moment would show the firemen hammering away with a pickax at ground level while the parachutists do the same underground. The picture would be captioned: “Race against death—and against all odds.”

June 13, 2008. Twenty minutes have passed and the firemen have worn themselves out on the stone slab, to no effect. In bad German, they stammer to the watching soldiers that it’s impossible to break this stone with the tools at hand. The weary SS guards dismiss them and bring in some dynamite. The explosives experts fuss around the slab for a while, and when everything’s ready they evacuate the church. Outside, everyone is told to move back. Below, the parachutists have surely stopped digging. The sudden silence must have alerted them, coming after such a racket. Something is about to happen—they can’t help but be aware of it. The explosion confirms it. A cloud of dust falls over them.

June 16, 2008. Pannwitz orders the rubble cleared away. The slab has been smashed in two. A Gestapo agent puts his head through the gaping hole. Straightaway, bullets whistle around his face. Pannwitz gives a satisfied smile. They’ve found the way in. They send two stormtroopers down, but it’s the same old problem: a cramped wooden staircase allows only one man at a time to pass. The first unlucky SS guards are shot down like skittles. But from now on, the parachutists have to watch over three different openings. Taking advantage of this distraction, one of the firemen grabs the ladder as it’s being used to push the firehose away from the vent for the umpteenth time, and manages to hoist it up to the street outside. Frank applauds. The fireman will be rewarded for his zeal (but punished after the liberation).

June 17, 2008. The situation is getting more and more difficult. The defenders have been deprived of their makeshift telescopic arm, and now their bunker is shipping water everywhere—both figuratively and literally. As soon as the SS have two entry points, added to the danger posed by the vent, the parachutists realize it’s all over. They’re screwed and they know it. They stop digging, if they haven’t already, and concentrate entirely on shooting their enemies. Pannwitz orders a new attack through the main entrance while grenades are thrown into the crypt and another man tries to get down through the trapdoor. Inside the crypt, the Stens spray bullets at the assailants. It’s total chaos. It’s the Alamo. And it goes on and on, and it doesn’t end, it comes from all sides, through the trapdoor, down the stairs, through the vent; and while the grenades fall in the water and don’t explode, the four men empty their guns at everything that moves.

June 18, 2008. They come to their last clip, and it’s the kind of thing that you grasp very quickly, I suppose, even (perhaps especially) in the heat of battle. The four men don’t need to speak. Gabk and his friend Valk smile at each other—I’m sure of that, I can see them. They know they’ve fought well. It’s noon when four dull explosions pierce the tumult of gunfire, which stops immediately. Silence falls once again on Prague, like a shroud of dust. The SS are like statues: nobody dares fire, or even move. They wait. Pannwitz stands rigid. He signals to an SS officer, who hesitates—where is the manly confidence that he ought, by law, to show in all circumstances?—then orders two of his men to go and see. Carefully, they descend the first few steps. Then, like two little boys, they stop and look back up at their commander, who signals that they should continue—weiter, weiter! Everybody in the church watches, breath held. They disappear into the crypt. Time passes slowly then a call is heard, in German, from beyond the grave. Revolver in hand, the officer jumps to his feet and rushes down the staircase. He comes back up, his trousers soaked up to his thighs, and yells: “Fertig!” It’s all over. Four bodies float in the water. Gabk, Valk, Svarc, and Hruby killed themselves in order not to fall into the Gestapo’s hands. On the surface of the water float ripped-up banknotes and identity papers. Among the objects scattered around the crypt are a stove, some clothes, mattresses, and a book. There are bloodstains on the wall and a pool of blood on the stairs—though that, at least, is German blood. And cartridge cases but not a single cartridge: they kept the last ones for themselves.

It is noon. It has taken eight hundred SS stormtroopers nearly eight hours to get the better of seven men.

251

I am coming to the end and I feel completely empty. Not just drained but empty. I could stop now, but that’s not how it works here. The people who took part in this story are not characters. And if they became characters because of me, I don’t wish to treat them like that. With a heavy heart—and without turning it into literature, or at least, without meaning to—I will tell you what became of those who were still alive on June 18, 1942.

When I watch the news, when I read the paper, when I meet people, when I hang out with friends and acquaintances, when I see how each of us struggles, as best we can, through life’s absurd meanderings, I think that the world is ridiculous, moving, and cruel. The same is true for this book: the story is cruel, the protagonists are moving, and I am ridiculous. But I am in Prague.

I fear that I am in Prague for the last time. The stone ghosts that people the town surround me, as always, with their threatening, welcoming, or indifferent presences. I see a young woman’s body, like an evanescent sculpture, with brown hair and white skin, pass under the Charles Bridge: a summer dress clings to her stomach and her thighs, the water streams over her bared chest, and on her breasts magical incantations are vanishing. The river water washes the hearts of men taken by the current. From Liliova Street I hear the echo of horses’ hooves striking the cobbles. In the tales and legends of old Prague, the city of alchemists, it’s said that the Golem will return when the city is in danger. But the Golem did not come back to protect the Jews or the Czechs. Nor, frozen in his centuries-old curse, did the iron man move when they opened Terezn, or when they killed people, when they despoiled, bullied, tortured, deported, shot, gassed, executed them in every conceivable way. By the time Gabk and Kubi landed, it was already too late. The disaster had occurred; there was nothing left to do but wreak vengeance. And it was stunning. But they, and their friends, and the Czech people, paid dearly for it.

Leopold Trepper, head of the French arm of the legendary Resistance organization Red Orchestra, made an observation: when a Resistance fighter fell into enemy hands and was offered the chance to cooperate, he had a choice: to accept or not. If he accepted, the damage could still be limited by saying as little as possible, hemming and hawing, releasing information drop by drop, and playing for time. This was the strategy Trepper adopted when he was arrested, and it was also the strategy used by A54. But they were both extremely high-level professional spies. Most of the time, the spy who accepted the offer to swap sides—even if he had until then resisted the worst kinds of torture—cracked very suddenly. From the moment he made his decision, he (to use Trepper’s memorable expression) “wallowed in betrayal as if in mud.” Karel urda is not content to lead the Gestapo to Heydrich’s assassins but also provides the names of all his contacts, and of all those who helped him after his return to his homeland. He sold Gabk and Kubi to the Nazis, but he gave thm all the others. Nothing forced him to mention the existence of Libuse, the radio transmitter, for example. Yet he puts the Gestapo on the trail of the final two escapees from Valk’s group, Silver A—Captain Bartos and the radiotelegrapher Potek. The trail leads to Pardubice, where Bartos—surrounded, after being chased on foot through the town—follows his comrades’ example and kills himself. Unfortunately, when they search his body they find a little book containing lots of addresses. Thus Pannwitz is able to keep following the thread. It passes through a tiny village called Leky, which becomes the Nagasaki to Lidice’s Hiroshima. On June 26, Potek the radiotelegrapher—the last parachutist still alive—sends the final message from Libuse: “The village of Lezaky, where I ended up with my transmitter, has been razed to the ground. The people who helped us were arrested [only two little blond girls suitable for Germanization would survive]. Thanks to their support, I was able to save myself and the transmitter. That day, Freda [Bartos] was not in Lezaky. I don’t know where he is and he doesn’t know where I am now. But I hope that we will manage to find one another. For now, I am alone. Next transmission: June 28 at 23 hours.” He roams through forests, is picked up at another village, and manages to escape once more. But, hunted, starving, exhausted, he is finally captured and shot on July 2 near Pardubice. I said he was the last of the parachutists, but that’s not true: there is still urda. The traitor gets his money, changes his name, marries a woman of good German stock, and becomes a full-time double agent on behalf of his new masters. During this time, A54, the German superagent, is sent to Mauthausen, where he manages to endlessly defer his own execution by playing the same game as Scheherezade. But not everyone has that many stories to tell.

Ata Moravec and his father; Kubi’s fiance, Anna Malinova; Gabk’s fiance, Libena Fafek (nineteen years old, probably pregnant), along with all her family; the Novaks, the Svatoes, the Zelenkas, Piskaceks, Khodls… I’m forgetting so many. The Orthodox priest of the church and all his colleagues; the people of Pardubice; all those who helped the parachutists in any way at all are arrested, deported, shot, or gassed. Professor Zelenka, however, has time to bite his cyanide pill when he’s arrested. It’s said that Mrs. Novak, the mother of the little girl with the bicycle, went mad before being sent to the gas chamber with her children. Very few slipped through the net, like the Moravecs’ concierge. Even Moula the dog, entrusted to the concierge by Valk, died of grief at having lost his master—or so the story goes. Well, the animal did accompany Valk on his scouting missions. But we must also add to this list everyone who had nothing to do with the assassination—hostages, Jews, political prisoners executed as part of the reprisals; whole villages; Anna Maruscakova and her lover, whose innocent letter led to the massacre at Lidice. There were also the parachutists’ families, whose only crime was to be related to them: handfuls of Kubies and Valks were sent to Mauthausen and gassed. Only Gabk’s family—his father and his sisters—would escape the massacre, thanks to their Slovak nationality. Because Slovakia was a satellite state rather than an occupied state, it kept up a semblance of independence by deciding not to execute its own countrymen, not even to please its threatening ally. In sum, thousands perished as a consequence of the assassination. But it’s said that all those who were tried for having helped the parachutists bravely declared to their Nazi judges that they regretted nothing and that they were proud to die for their country. The Moravecs did not betray their concierge. The Fafeks did not betray the Ogoun family, who also survived. I wish to pay my respects to these men and women: that’s what I’m trying to say, however clumsily. That’s what I didn’t want to forget to say, despite the inherent clumsiness of tributes and condolences.

Today, Gabk, Kubi, and Valk are heroes in their country, and their memory is regularly celebrated. Each has a street named after him, close to the scene of the assassination, and in Slovakia there is a small village called Gabkovo. They even continue to rise posthumously through the ranks; I think they’re captains at the moment. The men and women and children who helped them, directly or indirectly, are not so well-known. Worn-out by my muddled efforts to salute these people, I tremble with guilt at the thought of all those hundreds, those thousands, whom I have allowed to die in anonymity. But I want to believe that people exist even if we don’t speak of them.

252

The most appropriate tribute paid by the Nazis to Heydrich’s memory was not Hitler’s speech at his zealous servant’s funeral, but probably this: in July 1942 the program to exterminate all Poland’s Jews began, with the opening of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Between July 1942 and October 1943, more than two million Jews and almost fifty thousand Romany will die as part of this program. Its code name is Aktion Reinhard.

253

What is he thinking of, this Czech worker behind the wheel of a van one morning in October 1943? He drives through Prague’s winding streets, a cigarette in his mouth, and his head, I imagine, full of worries. Behind him, he can hear wooden crates or boxes sliding around and banging against the walls in rhythm with the curves through which he passes. Whether because he’s late or just because he’s impatient to get his chore over with so he can go and have a drink with his friends, he is driving fast over the snow-damaged tarmac. He doesn’t see the little blond figure running along the sidewalk. When this figure rushes into the road with that suddenness typical of children, he brakes—but it’s too late. The van hits the child, who rolls into the gutter. The driver does not know that he has killed little Klaus, eldest son of Reinhard and Lina Heydrich. Nor does he know that this moment of inattention will see him sent to a concentration camp.

254

Paul Thmmel (alias Ren, alias Karl, alias A54) has survived in Terezn until April ’45. But now that the Allies are at the gates of Prague, the Nazis are evacuating the country and they don’t want to leave any embarrassing witnesses behind. When they come to fetch him so he can be shot, Paul Thmmel asks his cell mate to send his regards to Colonel Moravec, if he ever gets the chance. He adds this message: “It was a real pleasure to work with the Czechoslovak information services. I am sorry it has to end like this, but I am comforted to think that all we accomplished was not in vain.” The message will get through.

255

“How could you have betrayed your comrades?”

“I think you’d have done the same thing for a million marks, Your Honor!”

Arrested by the Resistance near Pilsen during the last days of the war, Karel urda is tried and sentenced to death. He is hanged in 1947. As he climbs onto the scaffold, he tells the hangman an obscene joke.

256

My story is finished and my book should be, too, but I’m discovering that it’s impossible to be finished with a story like this. My father calls me to read out something he copied down at the Museum of Man in Paris, where he visited an exhibition on the recently deceased Germaine Tillion, an anthropologist and Resistance fighter who was sent to Ravensbrck. This is what the text said:

The vivisection experiments on 74 young female prisoners constitute one of Ravensbrck’s most sinister episodes. The experiments, conducted between August ’42 and August ’43, consisted of mutilating operations aimed at reproducing the injuries that caused the death of Reinhard Heydrich, the gauleiter of Czechoslovakia. Professor Gerhardt,having been unable to save Heydrich from a gaseous gangrene, wished to prove that the use of sulphonamides would have made no difference. So he deliberately infected the young women with viruses, and many of them died.

Passing over the inaccuracies (“gauleiter,” “Czechoslovakia,” “gaseous gangrene”), I now know that this story will never truly end for me, that I will always be learning new details relating to the extraordinary story of the assassination attempt on Heydrich on May 27, 1942, by Czechoslovak parachutists sent from London. “Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive,” said Roland Barthes. There you go—some good advice I never took.

257

A rusty steamboat glides across the Baltic, like a Nezval poem. Jozef Gabk is leaving behind the dark coastline of Poland and a few months spent inhabiting Krakw’s alleyways. He and the other ghosts of the Czechoslovak army have finally managed to set sail for France. They walk around the boat, tired, worried, uncertain, but at the same time joyful at the prospect of finally fighting the invader, although they don’t as yet know anything about the Foreign Legion, Algeria, the French campaign, or London fog. They bump into one another clumsily in the narrow gangways, searching for a cabin, a cigarette, or a familiar face. Gabk leans on his elbows and watches the sea: such a strange sight for someone, like him, from a landlocked country. That’s probably why his gaze is not fixed on the horizon—too obvious a symbol of his future—but on the boat’s waterline, where the waves swell and crash against the hull, then retreat and crash again in a hypnotic, deceptive movement. “Got a light, comrade?” Gabk recognizes the Moravian accent. The lighter’s flame illuminates his countryman’s face. A dimpled chin, lips made for smoking, and in the eyes—it’s quite striking—a little bit of the world’s goodness. “My name’s Jan,” he says. Smoke curls into the air and vanishes. Gabk smiles silently. They’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other during the journey. Mixed with the shadows of the soldiers in civilian clothes who pace around the boat are other shadows: disoriented old men, misty-eyed lone women, well-behaved children holding a younger brother’s hand. A young woman who looks like Natacha stands on deck, her hands on the railing, one leg bent up at the knee, playing with the hem of her skirt. And me? I am also there, perhaps.