I know everything it’s possible to know about this flight. I know what Gabčík and Kubiš had in their backpacks: a pocketknife, a pistol with two magazines and twelve cartridges, a cyanide pill, a piece of chocolate, meat-extract tablets, razor blades, a fake ID card, and some Czech currency. I know they were wearing civilian clothes made in Czechoslovakia. I know that, following orders, they didn’t say anything to their fellow parachutists during the flight apart from “Hello” and “Good Luck.” I know that their fellow parachutists suspected they were being sent to kill Heydrich. I know that it was Gabčík who most impressed the air dispatcher during the voyage. I know that they had to quickly make their wills before takeoff. I know the names of each member of the two other teams who accompanied them, along with their respective missions. And I also know each man’s fake identity. Gabčík and Kubiš, for example, were called Zdenek Vyskocil and Ota Navratil, and according to their false papers they were, respectively, a locksmith and a laborer. I know pretty much everything that can be known about this flight and I refuse to write a sentence like: “Automatically they checked the release boxes and static lines of their parachute harnesses.” Even if, without a doubt, they did exactly that.
“The taller of the two, Jan Kubiš, was twenty-seven years old and nearly six foot tall. He had blond hair and deep-set grey eyes that watched the world steadily…” et cetera. I’ll stop there. It’s a shame that Burgess wasted his time with clichés like this, because his book is undeniably well researched. I found two glaring errors—concerning Heydrich’s wife, whom he called Inga rather than Lina, and the color of his Mercedes, which he insists is dark green rather than black. I also spotted two dubious stories that I suspect Burgess of having invented, including a dark tale of swastikas branded on buttocks with a hot iron. But in other respects I learned a great deal about Gabčík and Kubiš’s life in Prague during the months before the assassination. It must be said that Burgess had an advantage over me: only twenty years after the events, he was able to talk to living witnesses. Yes, a few of them did survive.
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So, to cut a long story short, they jumped.
148
According to Eduard Husson, a reputable academic who is writing a biography of Heydrich, everything went wrong right from the beginning.
Gabčík and Kubiš are dropped a long way from the target area. They should have landed near Pilsen but actually end up a few miles from Prague. Now, you may say: well, that’s where the operation will take place, so in a way they’ve actually gained time. But such thinking just goes to show how little you know about secret operations. Their contacts in the Resistance are waiting for them in Pilsen. They don’t have an address in Prague. The people in Pilsen are supposed to make the introductions for them. So they are close to Prague, where they need to get to, but only after they’ve passed through Pilsen. They feel the absurdity of this roundabout journey every bit as much as you do, but they know it’s necessary all the same.
They feel it once they know where they are, but at this precise moment they don’t have the faintest idea. They land in a graveyard. They don’t know where to hide the parachutes, and Gabčík is limping badly because he’s fractured a toe landing on his native soil. They walk blindly and leave tracks. They bury the parachutes quickly under a snowdrift. The sun, they know, will soon rise: they are dangerously exposed and must find somewhere to hide.
They find a rocky shelter in a quarry. Protected from the snow and the cold but not from the Gestapo, they know they can’t stay here—but they don’t know where else to go. Strangers in their own land, lost, injured, and undoubtedly already the subject of a search—the Germans couldn’t have failed to hear the plane’s engines—the two men decide to wait. What else can they do? They consult the map, but it’s hard to imagine what they’re hoping for. To pinpoint the location of this tiny quarry? Their mission, hardly even begun, is already under threat of being aborted. Or, if we assume that they will never be discovered (which is a ridiculous supposition), of never getting started at all.
Anyway, they are discovered.
It’s a gamekeeper who finds them, early that morning. He heard the plane in the night, he found the parachutes in the graveyard, he followed their tracks in the snow. Now he enters the quarry. And, coughing, says to them: “Hello, lads!”
According to Eduard Husson, everything went wrong from the beginning, but they also had some good luck. The gamekeeper is a decent man. He knows he’s risking his life by doing so, but he’s going to help them.
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This gamekeeper is the first link in a long chain of Resistance fighters who will lead our two heroes to Prague, and to the Moravecs’ apartment.
The Moravec family consists of the father, the mother, and the youngest son, Ata. The eldest son is in England, flying a Spitfire. They are namesakes of Colonel Moravec, but not blood relations. Like him, however, they are resisting the German occupation.
And they’re not the only ones. Gabčík and Kubiš will meet lots of ordinary people ready to risk their lives in order to help them.
150
I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect—and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it—ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy—the unmappable pattern of causality.
I examine a map of Prague, marking the locations of the families who helped and sheltered the parachutists. Almost all of them paid with their lives—men, women, and children. The Svatoš family, a few feet from the Charles Bridge; the Ogoun family, near the castle; the Novak, Moravec, Zelenka, and Fafek families, all farther east. Each member of each of these families would deserve his or her own book—an account of their involvement with the Resistance until the tragic dénouement of Mauthausen. How many forgotten heroes sleep in history’s great cemetery? Thousands, millions of Fafeks and Moravecs, of Novaks and Zelenkas …
The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.
No reader could possibly retain this list of names, so why write it? For you to remember them, I would have to turn them into characters. Unfair, but there you go. I know already that only the Moravecs, and perhaps the Fafeks, will find a place in my story. The Svatošes, the Novaks, the Zelenkas—not to mention all those whose names or existence I’m unaware of—will return to their oblivion. But in the end a name is just a name. I think of them all. I want to tell them. And if no one hears me, that doesn’t matter. Not to them, and not to me. One day, perhaps, someone in need of solace will write the story of the Novaks and the Svatošes, of the Zelenkas and the Fafeks.
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On January 8, 1942, Gabčík (limping) and Kubiš walk upon Prague’s sacred earth for the first time. I’m sure they marvel at the city’s Baroque beauty. First, though, they must deal with the three great problems facing any secret mission: accommodation, provisions, and identification. London has equipped them with fake ID cards, but it’s not enough—far from it. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1942, you must be able to produce a work permit. And, above all, if you are stopped in the daytime hanging around in the streets—which will often be the case for Gabčík and Kubiš during the coming months—you must have a very good reason not to be working. The Resistance talks to the doctor who treats Gabčík’s foot: he diagnoses an ulcer in Gabčík’s duodenum, and for Kubiš an inflamed gallbladder, thus establishing the two men’s inability to work. So their papers are in order and they’ve got money. Now they must find a place to stay. But as they will soon discover to their pleasure, there is no shortage of people willing to help them even in these dark times.