Operation Anthropoid
They could not have known that mere months before they assassinated him, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich had laid out the blueprint for what would become the Holocaust.
In late May of 1942, Heydrich, the highest-ranking police and security official in the Reich, subordinate only to Himmler and Hitler, drew his final breath in Prague. The man Hitler himself was reputed to have nicknamed ‘The Man with an Iron Heart’ died as a result of an attack by a group of Czechoslovakian soldiers—referred to commonly these days as ‘the parachutists’, a reference that originated with German propaganda and has trickled down to be widely accepted in the popular vernacular.
The two men who carried out the fatal blows of Operation Anthropoid were Jozef Gabčík, a Slovak, and Jan Kubiš, a Czech from Moravia.
copyright Erin Faith Allen
These men had arrived in Czechoslovakia after training in England in conjunction with the Czech government in exile in London and the British SOE. After they were air-dropped, the parachutists were swept up by a gang of quiet and stubborn Czechs who had survived Heydrich’s brutal repression of the Resistance. They provided homes and supplies.
After the attack on Heydrich, Kubiš and Gabčík were hidden by the Resistance network and eventually made their way to the crypt of a church on Resslova Street. Joining them were five of their comrades: Adolf Opálka, Josef Valčík, Josef Bublík, Jan Hruby, and Jaroslav Svarc.
They hid underground for over two weeks before they were betrayed by a fellow parachutist. The SS descended, and after a fierce fight, all the men were dead. Some were mortally wounded in the attack; the others committed suicide rather than fall into Nazi hands.
My friend Pavel Kmoch shared a detail with me, one that he uncovered through his own meticulous research. Inside the seemingly insignificant sidenote, I find tender evidence that these legendary men were human just like the rest of us. Jozef Gabčik, a Slovak by birth, spoke Czech always—unless he was in a stressful situation, when he reverted to Slovak swear words. I don’t happen to know any of those words, but I can imagine that Gabčik may have had an outburst or two in Slovak over those fateful days.
Dablice is the cemetery where the bodies of he and Kubiš and the other parachutists lie tangled with hundreds of others, headless, in a mass grave. In a sickening twist, their bodies lie with the man who betrayed them - and the men who ordered their death.
copyright Erin Faith Allen
I walk the length of the cemetery with my driver, Yarda, down the long avenue of trees, under the gaze of bare branches scouring the skies. I always get emotional here. I love these parachutists, these heroes. These courageous, self-sacrificing men. It’s the strangest thing: their bodies were thrown into this pit thirty-two years before I was even born, but I really do love them. Just as there were many villains in that great big world war, there were many heroes. But it’s Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš who own the special place in my heart reserved for heroic deeds.
“Look at all the trees around them,” Yarda says. “They say that in a cemetery the decomposing bodies feed the trees, from soil to roots and all the way up through the tips of the branches.” My first thought is: If that’s true, do the tree’s growth rings reveal nourishment from heroic flesh?
In that moment, it becomes impossible to separate the parachutists from the trees.
I stand and look at the sturdy trunks stretching toward the very sky Gabčík and Kubiš themselves had fallen through. From up there, they dangled on down to earth through rarefied air, destined for greatness and their own demise.
I want nothing more than to sit here for a while, surrounded by life and death, and talk to these tall friends. Instead, we leave. The sun is going down. The lone figure of the cemetery groundskeeper can be seen making the rounds, and he will soon lock the gates. It is time for Yarda to return me to my hotel. Walking back to the car through the long avenue of trees, sudden sheets of rain fall from Gabčík and Kubiš’s sky.
We are soaked to the bone. I shiver.
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An excerpt from my book The In Between.