HHhH: A Novel

by Laurent Binet

  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, Čurda and Ata Moravec are brought to the vent. Ata refuses to speak, but Čurda shouts through the opening: “Give yourselves up, lads! They’ve treated me well. You’ll be prisoners of war—it’ll be all right.” Gabčík and Valčík 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 there? 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. Gabčík and his friend Valčík 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. Gabčík, Valčík, 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 Terezín, or when they killed people, when they despoiled, bullied, tortured, deported, shot, gassed, executed them in every conceivable way. By the time Gabčík and Kubiš 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 Čurda 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 Gabčík and Kubiš to the Nazis, but he gave them 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 Valčík’s group, Silver A—Captain Bartos and the radiotelegrapher Potůček. 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 Ležáky, which becomes the Nagasaki to Lidice’s Hiroshima. On June 26, Potůček 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 Čurda. 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; Kubiš’s fiancée, Anna Malinova; Gabčík’s fiancée, Libena Fafek (nineteen years old, probably pregnant), along with all her family; the Novaks, the Svatošes, 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 Valčík, died of grief at having lost his master—or so the story goes. Well, the animal did accompany Valčík 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 Kubišes and Valčíks were sent to Mauthausen and gassed. Only Gabčík’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, Gabčík, Kubiš, and Valčík 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 Gabčíkovo. 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 Thümmel (alias René, alias Karl, alias A54) has survived in Terezín 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 Thümmel 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 Čurda 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 Resistanc
e fighter who was sent to Ravensbrück. This is what the text said:

  The vivisection experiments on 74 young female prisoners constitute one of Ravensbrück’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 Gabčík is leaving behind the dark coastline of Poland and a few months spent inhabiting Kraków’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. Gabčík 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?” Gabčík 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. Gabčík 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.