Whenever I talk about the book I’m writing, I say, “My book on Heydrich.” But Heydrich is not supposed to be the main character. Through all the years that I carried this story around with me in my head, I never thought of giving it any other title than Operation Anthropoid (and if that’s not the title you see on the cover, you will know that I gave in to the demands of my publisher, who didn’t like it: too SF, too Robert Ludlum, apparently). You see, Heydrich is the target, not the protagonist. Everything I’ve written about him is by way of background. Though it must be admitted that in literary terms Heydrich is a wonderful character. It’s as if a Dr. Frankenstein novelist had mixed up the greatest monsters of literature to create a new and terrifying creature. Except that Heydrich is not a paper monster.
I’m all too aware that my two heroes are late making their entrance. But perhaps it’s no bad thing if they have to wait. Perhaps it will give them more substance. Perhaps the mark they’ve made in history and on my memory might imprint itself even more profoundly in these pages. Perhaps this long wait in the antechamber of my brain will restore some of their reality, and not just vulgar plausibility. Perhaps, perhaps … but nothing could be less sure! I’m not scared of Heydrich anymore. It’s those two who intimidate me.
And yet I can see them. Or let’s say that I am beginning to discern them.
89
On the borders of eastern Slovakia is a city I know well—Košice. This is where I did my military service: I was the sublieutenant responsible for teaching French to the Slovakian air force’s young future officers. Košice is also the town where Aurélia—the beautiful Slovak woman with whom I had a passionate five-year relationship, nearly ten years ago now—was born. And incidentally, it is, of all the world’s cities I’ve ever visited, the one with the highest concentration of pretty girls. And when I say pretty, I mean exceptionally beautiful.
I don’t see any reason why this should have been any different in 1939. The pretty girls stroll eternally on Hlavná ulica—the long main street that is the heart of the town, lined by gorgeous pastel-colored Baroque houses, with a magnificent Gothic cathedral at its center. Except that, in 1939, you also see German soldiers, who greet the pretty girls discreetly as they pass. Slovakia has indeed gained its independence—the prize for its betrayal of Prague—but it is an independence surveyed by the friendly, searching eyes of Germany.
Jozef Gabčík sees all of this, walking up the grand main street: the pretty girls and the German soldiers. He’s been thinking it over for several months now.
Two years ago he left Košice to work in a chemical factory in Žilina. He has come back today to meet up with his friends from the 14th Infantry regiment, in which he served for three years. Spring is late and the stubborn snow whispers under his boots.
The cafés in Košice rarely open onto the street. Normally, you have to go under a porch, then either up or down a staircase, in order to reach a well-heated room. Gabčík meets his former comrades in such a café that very evening. Reunited over pints of Zlatý Bažant (a Slovak beer whose name means “Golden Pheasant’), everyone is very happy. But Gabčík hasn’t come just to make a social visit. He wants to know where the Slovak army is, and its position with regard to Tiso, the collaborator.
“The field officers have fallen in with Tiso; you know, Jozef, for them, the break with the Czech staff, it’s a chance to get promoted more quickly…”
“The army hasn’t protested: neither the officers nor the troops. It’s a new Slovak army, so they’ve got to obey the new Slovak government. That’s understandable, isn’t it?”
“We’ve wanted independence for years, so who cares how we get it! Tough shit for the Czechs! If they’d treated us better, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation now! You know as well as I do that the Czechs always got the best jobs. In the government, the army, everywhere! It was a scandal!”
“Anyway, we had no choice: if Tiso hadn’t said yes to Hitler, we’d have been flattened like they were. And yeah, I know it’s a bit like being occupied, but in the end we’ve still got more autonomy than we had with the Czechs.”
“In Prague, you know, German is now the official language! They’re closing all the Czech universities. They’re censoring all Czech culture. They’ve even shot at students! Is that what you want? Believe me, this was the best solution…”
“It was the only solution, Jozef!”
“Why should we have fought when it was Hácha himself who told us to surrender? All we were doing was obeying orders.”
“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 n
ot 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.
On the other hand, he did go through Kraków, as I’d supposed. After fighting alongside the Poles during the German attack that started the Second World War, he fled. Perhaps via the Balkans, like a great number of Czechs and Slovaks who went to France, crossing Romania and Greece, then reaching Istanbul, Egypt, and finally Marseilles. Or perhaps he went through the Baltic, which would seem more practical: leaving the port of Gdynia and arriving at Boulogne-sur-Mer, then traveling south. Whatever, I’m sure that this journey is an epic deserving of a whole book to itself. For me, the crowning moment would be his first meeting with Kubiš. How and when did they meet? In Poland? In France? During the journey between the two? Or later, in England? That’s what I would love to know. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to “visualize” (that is, invent!) this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything.
93
A train pulls into the station. In the immense hall of Victoria Station, Colonel Moravec waits on the platform, accompanied by a few other exiled compatriots. A man gets off the train: a serious-looking little man with a mustache and a receding hairline. It’s Beneš, the former president who resigned the day after Munich. But today—July 18, 1939, the date of his arrival in London—he is above all the man who declared, the day after Hácha’s surrender, that the First Czechoslovak Republic still existed, in spite of the attack it had suffered. “The German divisions,” he said, “swept up the concessions torn from us by our enemies and by our allies in the name of peace, justice, and good sense, the gentle reasons invoked at the time of the 1938 crisis. Now the Czechoslovak territory is occupied. But the Republic is not dead. It will continue to fight, even from beyond its own borders.” Beneš, seen by Czechoslovak patriots as the only legitimate president, wants to form a provisional government-in-exile as quickly as possible. A year before the Appeal of June 18, Beneš is a bit like a combination of de Gaulle and Churchill. The spirit of the Resistance is in him.
Unfortunately, it is not yet Churchill who guides the destiny of Britain and the world but the vile Chamberlain, a man whose spinelessness is equaled only by his blindness. He has sent a lowly Foreign Ministry employee to welcome the former president. And the pen pusher’s welcome is not particularly warm either. Barely is Beneš off the train before he is notified of the conditions of his exile: Great Britain agrees to grant him political asylum only on the express condition that he promises to refrain from all political activity. Beneš, who is recognized as the de facto head of the liberation movement both by his friends and his enemies, takes the insult with his customary dignity. He, more than anyone else, will have to put up with Chamberlain’s contemptuous stupidity—and he will do it with absolutely superhuman stoicism. If for this reason only, his historical reputation is almost more imposing than de Gaulle’s.
94
It’s now fourteen days since the SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks arrived incognito in the little town of Gleiwitz, on the German-Polish border in German Silesia. The operation has been meticulously planned; now he waits. Heydrich called him yesterday at midday to ask him to check the final details with “Gestapo” Müller, who came in person, and who is staying in the neighboring village of Oppeln. Muller is supposed to provide him with what they call the Konserve (“canned goods”).
It’s 4:00 a.m. when the phone rings in his hotel room. He answers, and is told to call back to Wilhelmstrasse. At the other end of the line, Heydrich’s shrill voice tells him: “Grandmother is dead.” This is the signal: Operation Tannenberg can begin. Naujocks rounds up his men and goes to the radio station that he plans to attack. But before the action starts, he must give each member of the expedition a Polish uniform. He mu
st also receive the Konserve: a prisoner expressly freed from a concentration camp. This man, too, is dressed as a Polish soldier—unconscious but still alive, although Müller, following orders, has given him a lethal injection.
The attack begins at 8:00 a.m. The employees are easily neutralized, and a few gunshots are fired in the air as a matter of form. The Konserve is left lying across the doorway, as evidence of the Polish attack, and it is almost certainly Naujocks who finishes him off with a bullet in the heart (a bullet in the back of the neck smacks too much of execution, and a bullet in the head risks delaying identification), even if he will never admit it at his trial. Now they have to broadcast the speech in Polish, prepared by Heydrich. One of the SS guards, chosen for his linguistic abilities, is given the job of reading it out. The trouble is that no one knows how to work the radio. Naujocks gets a bit panicky, but in the end they manage to transmit it. The announcement is read out in a feverish Polish. It’s a short speech declaring that Poland, provoked by Germany, has decided to launch an attack. The transmission lasts less than four minutes. In any case, the transmitter is not powerful enough and, save for a few small border towns, nobody hears it. Who cares? Naujocks does, having been warned beforehand by Heydrich: “If you fail, you die. And me, too, perhaps.”
But Hitler has what he needs, and he couldn’t care less about the technical difficulties. A few hours later he makes a speech to the Reichstag deputies: “Last night, Polish soldiers opened fire for the first time on German soil. This morning, Germany retaliated. From now on, bombs will be met by bombs.”
The Second World War has just begun.
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