“Beneš? Yeah, yeah, but he’s fighting the war from London—that’s much easier. Us poor bastards are stuck here.”
“And all of this is his fault. He signed the Munich Agreement, didn’t he? He didn’t send us to fight for the Sudetenland, remember? At the time, our army might have been able to put up a fight—I say might have been!—with the Germans … But now, what could we do? Have you seen the numbers of the Luftwaffe? You know how many bombers they’ve got in service? They’d cut through us like butter. We’d be massacred!”
“I don’t want to die for Hácha—or for Beneš!”
“I don’t want to die for Tiso either!”
“All right, so there are a few German soldiers hanging around the city. So what? I’m not going to pretend I like it, but it’s not as bad as a real military occupation. Go and ask your Czech friends!”
“I’ve got nothing against the Czechs but they’ve always treated us like peasants. I went to Prague once and they pretended they couldn’t understand me because of my accent! They’ve always despised us. Now let’s see how they get on with their new compatriots! We’ll see if they prefer the German accent!”
“Hitler got what he wanted. He said he wouldn’t make any more territorial claims. And us, we’ve never been part of the German zone. Anyway, if it wasn’t for him, Hungary would have swallowed us up, Jozef! You have to see things how they are.”
“What do you want? A coup d’état? No general would have the balls to do that. And even if one did, what would happen afterward? We take on the German army on our own? You think France and England would suddenly rush to our aid? We spent a whole year waiting for them!”
“Listen, Jozef, you’ve got a steady job: go back to Žilina, find yourself a nice girl, and forget about all this. We didn’t come out of it too badly in the end.”
Gabčík has finished his beer. It’s already late, and he and his comrades are slightly drunk. Outside, it’s snowing. He stands up, waves goodbye to his friends, and goes to retrieve his coat from the cloakroom. While a young girl is serving him, one of his companions comes over. He whispers:
“Listen, Jozef, if you want to know, when the Czechs were demobilized after the Germans arrived, some refused to return to civilian life. Perhaps out of patriotism or perhaps because they didn’t want to find themselves unemployed, I don’t know. But anyway, they went to Poland and they’ve formed a Czechoslovak liberation army. I don’t think there are many of them, but I know there are some Slovaks involved. They’re based in Kraków. You see, if I did that, I’d be considered a deserter, and I can’t leave my wife and kids. But if I were your age, and if I were single … Tiso is scum, that’s what I think, and most of the other guys too. We haven’t all turned into Nazis, you know. But we’re shit-scared. What’s happening in Prague is terrible—they’re executing anyone who shows the slightest sign of protesting. Me, I’m going to try to live with the situation. I won’t overdo it, but I’ll go along with them. As long as they don’t start telling us to deport the Jews…”
Gabčík smiles at his friend. He puts on his coat, thanks him, and leaves. Outside, night has fallen. The streets are deserted and the snow crunches beneath his feet.
90
On his way back to Žilina, Gabčík makes his decision. At the end of his working day at the factory, he says goodbye to his friends as though nothing is going on. But he doesn’t accompany them, as he usually does, to the bar on the corner. Instead he rushes home, where he takes not a suitcase but a little canvas bag, puts on two coats (one on top of the other) and his soldier’s boots (the most solid boots he owns), then leaves, locking the door behind him. He calls on one of his sisters—the one he’s closest to—and leaves her his keys. She’s one of the few who knows about his plans. She makes him tea and he drinks it in silence. He stands up. She holds him tightly in her arms and cries. Then he heads for the bus station, where he waits for a bus that will take him north, toward the border. He smokes a few cigarettes. He feels perfectly calm. He’s not the only one waiting on the platform, so nobody takes any notice of him despite the fact that he’s dressed too warmly for May. The bus arrives. Gabčík dives inside and grabs a seat. The doors close again. The bus moves off with a roar. Through the window, Gabčík watches Žilina grow smaller. He will never see the town again. The Baroque and Romanesque towers of the old town stand out against the dark horizon that fades away behind him. When Gabčík casts one last glance at Budatín Castle, located at the confluence of two of the three rivers that flow through the town, he cannot know that it will be almost totally destroyed in the years that follow. Nor can he know that he is leaving Slovakia forever.
91
That scene, like the one before it, is perfectly believable and totally made up. How impudent of me to turn a man into a puppet—a man who’s been dead for a long time, who cannot defend himself. To make him drink tea, when it might turn out that he liked only coffee. To make him put on two coats, when perhaps he had only one. To make him take the bus, when he could have taken the train. To decide that he left in the evening, rather than the morning. I am ashamed of myself.
But it could be worse. I spared Kubiš a similarly fanciful treatment, probably because Moravia, where he’s from, is less familiar to me than Slovakia. It was June 1939 when Kubiš went to Poland, from where he reached France—I don’t know how—and enrolled in the Foreign Legion. That’s all I have to say. I don’t know if he went via Kraków, the main rallying point for Czech soldiers who refused the surrender. I suppose he joined the Legion in Agde, in the south of France, with the first infantry battalion of exiled Czechoslovak armed forces. Or had the battalion, whose ranks were swelling daily, already become a regiment? A few months later it will be practically a whole division and will fight alongside the French army during the war. I could write quite a lot about the Czechs in the French army: the 11,000 soldiers, made up of 3,000 volunteers and 8,000 expatriate Czech conscripts, along with the brave pilots, trained at Chartres, who will shoot down or help to shoot down more than 130 enemy planes during the Battle of France … But I’ve said that I don’t want to write a historical handbook. This story is personal. That’s why my visions sometimes get mixed up with the known facts. It’s just how it is.
92
Actually, no: that’s not how it is. That would be too simple. Rereading one of the books that make up the foundation of my research—a collection of witness accounts assembled by a Czech historian, Miroslav Ivanov, under the title The Attack on Heydrich—I become aware, to my horror, of the mistakes I’ve made concerning Gabčík.
First of all, Košice had since November 1938 been part of Hungary, not Czechoslovakia, and the town was occupied by Admiral Horthy’s army, so it’s highly unlikely that Gabčík would have been able to visit his comrades from the 14th Infantry. Second, by May 1, 1939, when he left Slovakia for Poland, he had been working for almost two years in a factory near Trenčín, so in all likelihood he no longer lived in Žilina. The passage where I recount his last glance at the castle seems suddenly ridiculous. In fact, he never quit the army, and it was as a noncommissioned officer that he was working in the chemical factory, whose products were destined for military use. I also forgot to mention that before he left his job, he perpetrated an act of sabotage: he poured acid into some mustard gas, which apparently harmed (how, I’ve no idea) the German army. What a thing to forget! Not only do I deprive Gabčík of his first act of resistance—a minor one, admittedly, but still courageous—but I also omit a link in the great causal chain of human destiny. Gabčík himself explains, in a biographical note written in England when he put himself forward as a candidate for special missions, that he left the country straight after this act of sabotage because he would inevitably have been arrested if he’d stayed.