‘So, only six months to go then you can have the best Christmas you ever had,’ reasoned Hrubý, determined to play the optimist. ‘Is that so unbearable when you have a whole long life ahead of you?’
‘Christmas could not be worse than last year.’ Kubiš was joining in the small talk now. ‘For my dinner I got a tin of pressed meat and a precious can of condensed milk poured over an apple. And I had to spend the day in the pub with that bad tempered bastard over there.’ He pointed at Gabčík who snorted a laugh in response. ‘It took more than a few pints of beer to restore my natural good humour.’
‘That’s all you need for a perfect Christmas, a good drink,’ reasoned Valčík. ‘Well, perhaps not all. A nice warm fire, a bottle or two of beer, some shots of Slivovitz and someone prettier than you lot to sleep next to, that’s all I need,’ and he smiled at the prospect.
‘What about the food?’ said Opálka. There were murmurs of agreement from men who had received little more than bread and cold meat or cheese to sustain them for days now.
‘What I would give for some fried carp and potato salad,’ the young lieutenant continued. ‘In my town there are men who go door to door selling the carp at Christmas time.’
Bublík spoke from a prone position, head propped up against his bag, ‘Steaming hot bowls of Oukrop, made with goose fat and garlic, served with slices of black bread.’
‘Don’t let’s think about it,’ groaned Gabčík but his eyes grew distant at the mention of the traditional garlic soup.
‘Or how about a roast goose with white cabbage and dumplings?’ offered Kubiš.
‘Stop, you’re making me homesick,’ Gabčík tried to look pained but then he smiled. ‘What sweet things will there be?’
‘Moravian tarts with cinnamon and poppy seeds,’ announced Kubiš triumphantly. ‘Or strudels; enormous ones, stuffed with apples and sugar.’
‘No more please. I can’t take it,’ protested Gabčík. His stomach actually growled audibly, to the amusement of all.
Possibly it was the reminiscence from a better world that pushed Kubiš into it or perhaps the biting drop in temperature, which the men had complained about all afternoon, but he suddenly announced. ‘I have had enough of living down here like a rat. I am going to sleep upstairs.’
‘You can’t do that, Jan. What if someone checks up there in the night?’ Valčík countered.
‘I’m taking my bedroll up to the choir loft. I’ll lock myself in. An entire congregation could enter the church and still not know I was there. At least it will be dry and warmer as well.’
Opálka was already getting to his feet. ‘Sounds like a good idea. I am sick of lying here in the gloom.’ And he picked up his bedroll, weapons and ammunition. Bublík followed suit.
‘Well, I suppose it can do no harm. If you keep your heads down,’ cautioned Gabčík.
‘We will. Care to join us?’ asked his friend.
‘I don’t think so, Jan. I feel safer down here. At least now I will be away from your snoring.’
‘It’s not my snoring, it’s you. You snore so loud you wake yourself up.’
It was an ongoing lighthearted argument; neither man snored and anyone who did would soon be wakened by a jab in the ribs from an alarmed comrade, desperate to maintain the security of their position.
‘Be careful, Jan.’ Gabčík was serious now. ‘Don’t let your guard down. Not even for a moment.’
‘I won’t.’ And Jan rewarded his friend’s concern with a warm smile. He would miss their comradeship, if not the cold.
As Kubiš walked off towards the choir loft, Opálka and Bublík followed on behind. Jan was glad to be heading away from the crypt. The place made him feel like a dead man already.
At first Čurda’s story was treated with some suspicion. He appeared to be yet another in a relatively long line of lunatics, would be collaborators or terror struck family men who had visited the Petschek Palace in the past week. All were eager to either claim the reward money or the amnesty and avoid the arbitrary punishments of the assassination’s aftermath; men whose stories of possessing information on the killing were soon exposed as the desperate fantasies of often unhinged individuals, some with petty grievances against neighbours they were only too keen to link to the plot.
All of that changed when Čurda was able, unaided, to pick out the briefcase Gabčík left at the scene of the attack, despite its presence among twenty similar ones. This successful ID parade afforded Čurda an exalted status and the Gestapo began to beat him with enthusiasm.
During the course of long hours of questioning, Čurda would eventually admit to being a parachutist himself but would repeatedly state he had done nothing wrong and in fact wholeheartedly disagreed with the assassination. Furthermore he did not support Beneš’ exiled government which had so treacherously persuaded him to return to Prague for the sole purpose of relaying messages back to London on the state of affairs in the Protectorate. On arrival he had immediately abandoned this plan and sought to keep himself to himself, accepting the status quo of the occupation and staying out of trouble. In many ways he even approved of the German presence, he said. It had brought order and ensured no possibility of colonisation from the hated communists of the east.
This rambling diatribe proved insufficient to satisfy Čurda’s accusers. They merely continued to beat him, in time with their demand for the whereabouts of the men who had killed their leader in such a cowardly and underhand fashion.
‘I watched the last man we had down here scratching the floor, trying to pick up his broken teeth with smashed hands,’ a smiling interrogator assured him.
Čurda, realising he was now in a situation entirely beyond his control, finally cracked and abandoned all sense of a partial, limited treachery. He began to betray with a relish that impressed even his interrogators. They stopped beating him and began writing; names, addresses, aliases, of parachutists, resistance workers and the owners of safe houses across the city. By the middle of the afternoon, Pannwitz held a piece of paper exposing entire networks and all from the mouth of just one terrified man.
Every scrap of the confession would be used – the networks rolled up, agents tortured for further intelligence then hanged, but all of that could wait for now. Pannwitz possessed one piece of information he would act upon immediately; for Čurda had finally supplied the names of the two suspected assassins. According to him, Josef Gabčík and his closest friend Jan Kubiš had killed Heydrich. Only a single crucial, undisclosed fact remained; the current whereabouts of the two men. No, Čurda did not actually know where they were right now but he was convinced they were still in Prague and might even be hiding in one of the city’s churches, though he did not know which one. He assured the Gestapo he was keen to help in any way he could. In fact, he thought he knew someone who might very well be aware of the men’s present location. With no further urging, Čurda gave up Aunt Marie’s address.
39
‘The Victor will never be asked if he told the truth’
Adolf Hitler
As young Ata Moravec was dragged out through the wrecked front door of his home he banged his head sharply against the solid piece of wood, which now hung at an angle, suspended from a single hinge near its base.
As the SS ransacked her home and two soldiers frogmarched her son from the building, Aunt Marie reached for the capsule of poison in her pocket. She did not hesitate for a second, knowing time was short before she would be led away. Surely a less idiotic soldier would never have allowed her the opportunity to visit her own bathroom before she was arrested. Perhaps her stout middle-aged figure and gentle, defeated countenance made the dimwitted private think of his own mother for an instant. Whatever the reason, his permission had been a tiny mercy and at least now she would die in her own home and not some cold, damp cell and maybe they would be happy then and let her son go.
As a woman she was
a realist, holding no illusions that her life could continue beyond this day. There would be no reason for the Gestapo to keep her alive after interrogation. All Marie had to look forward to was torture and the certain realisation that she would eventually be forced to betray resistance workers all over Prague. For their sake, she knew too much to allow herself the luxury of a moment longer in this life. Aunt Marie said a silent prayer for the soul of her imperilled son and bit down into the capsule.
Ata was already secured in the back of the truck when a Scharführer discovered the scene in the bathroom. Aunt Marie was curled up on the floor in front of him as lifeless as any gunshot victim. The sergeant cursed, promised the foolish private under his command a swift posting to the thick of the fighting on the outskirts of Kharkov on the Russian front, then ordered the rest of his men to throw the body into a separate truck and immediately transport it and Ata to the Petschek Palace, adding quickly, ‘Don’t let him see her body or tell him his mother’s dead. The Gestapo may want to use that little piece of information when it suits them.’
Drink and beatings, the level of which he would not have thought possible to survive, had stupefied Ata. One of his eyes was completely closed and that, together with broken bones on the same side of his face, gave him a lopsided look.
The vodka they forced him to consume made the young man repeatedly sick and he had soiled himself more than once during the agonies of torture. He tried not to look at his fingers, for he knew they had been turned to bloody stumps following the enthusiastic attention of a Gestapo thug, who had punctuated his use of the pliers with repeated vengeful reminders that, ‘This is for Heydrich’.
The interrogation had been as simple as it was horrifyingly brutal. And it always came back to one question, ‘Where are the parachutists?’
‘Tell us, Ata, and all this will end,’ urged the young officer who led the part of the interrogation not dominated by physical torture. ‘If you don’t tell me I can’t protect you from him.’ He nodded at the burly inquisitor who had worked on Ata so resolutely; his only concession to the stifling heat of the cell being to remove his tunic and attack the boy in shirtsleeves.
‘I can see you are a reasonable young man. You want to do what is right, I can tell that,’ reassured the officer in a soothing, empathetic tone, ‘so tell us, please. We will find out anyway soon enough and all of this will have been for nothing. You must see that surely?’
But Ata could not see, and he resisted all attempts to confess the whereabouts of Kubiš, the bright and glamorous hero who had befriended this young man and made him feel less insignificant as a result. Kubiš was everything Ata wanted to be. And so he blotted out all thoughts of the crypt and continued to deny any knowledge of parachutists until the young officer had tired of his lack of cooperation and ordered yet another beating, followed by a near drowning from the vodka bottle.
Then they left him for a while to wallow in the excruciating pain and alcoholic haze. He had no idea how long he had been alone but it must have been some time. Eventually the door was kicked open and his chief tormentor returned with two henchmen. They quickly freed Ata from the restraints in his chair and lifted him to his feet, causing a wave of nausea and intense pain to burn through his body. The young man was dragged upright along a corridor, feet trailing behind him, his bare toes scraping across the cold concrete. Then the door of another cell was flung open and he was thrown in, landing heavily, face first on the ground.
It took a while before the pain ebbed away sufficiently for him to peel his face from the cold stone floor and look about him. Ata’s eyes instinctively went to a large, dark shape at the end of the room – it appeared to be a fish tank filled with water, an anachronistic presence in the bare walls of the Petscheck Palace, where every item had a purpose. Mindful of this, Ata peered at the dark water. After a moment he was able to make out the message the Gestapo had sent him.
Through the glass he could clearly see his mother’s severed head resting on the bottom of the tank – its opened eyes staring sightlessly back at him. Ata would never know, as he descended into a form of lunacy, whether his piercing screams were delivered aloud or merely confined to his fevered brain.
40
‘I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature’
Adolf Hitler
A handful of gurgled words from a crazed and desolate Ata, who had been assured his father’s head would join his mother’s if he did not cooperate, was all it took to mobilise seven hundred Waffen SS Soldiers in full battle order. Through his sobs and moans of despair the young man finally gave up the church of St Cyril and St Methodius and that was all the Gestapo needed. At four o’clock in the morning the order was given to begin a seemingly endless procession of lorries, which transported men from the handful of barracks that encircled the capital. The night air was filled with the growls and rumbles of engines as the trucks navigated the myriad bends of the city streets.
Pannwitz and Frank arrived at the scene early, intent on controlling this most vital of operations and ensuring nothing could be allowed to go wrong. Ata and Čurda were forced to attend as witnesses. There were no civilians on the streets at this hour and residents of overlooking buildings were forcibly evacuated by troops who ran up and down cradling rifles and machine pistols under the direction of an SS Captain. When they were finally in position, Frank was assured every door, window, rooftop and manhole cover, within a twenty-street radius, had a German gun trained on it.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ said Frank. ‘I will, of course, hold you personally responsible if any of them is allowed to escape.’
The captain saluted his understanding and returned to the task in hand.
It didn’t take long for Valčík to work out what was happening. He’d been hoisted up to the vent in the crypt by Gabčík and Hrubý as soon as the men were disturbed by the rumble of the lorries. The sight that greeted him was chilling; seemingly hundreds of soldiers were dropping from the tailgates of those lorries then being ordered into the streets around the church, blocking their escape. Someone had betrayed them.
They could tell from Valčík’s face as soon as they lowered him to the ground that their situation was hopeless. ‘We’re surrounded,’ he told them and each man experienced a deep sense of terror. Their worst fears had been realised. The crypt that had been their sanctuary would now become a trap with no prospect of escape.
‘How many?’ asked Gabčík and when Valčík’s eyes met his, the other man looked despairing.
‘Hundreds,’ he said.
‘Jesus… could they be… do you think…?’ Švarc was desperately hoping the Germans might not know where they were. ‘Are you sure they realise…?’
‘They know we are here,’ Valčík assured him. ‘It’s over.’
Twenty men made the first incursion into the church. The nervous janitor of the St Cyril and St Methodius had been roused from his sleep to admit them. Pannwitz led the column of Waffen SS soldiers into the church himself. He was still a policeman and wanted to be in on the arrest. They had been told to move quietly but the men’s jackboots signalled their arrival, footsteps echoing against the ancient flagstones as they fanned out between the pews, creating an effect not unlike the ripple of polite applause at a concert.
Realising their presence was already betrayed Pannwitz ordered the janitor to illuminate the building and the church was soon partially revealed. More than once the Germans gave nervous glances towards intruders present only in their imaginations.
The head of the anti-sabotage division watched as his men searched under every seat, peered behind the lectern, lifted cloth from the altar and found nothing. Then a voice came from out of a dark corner of the room.
‘It’s locked, sir.’
Pannwitz walked over to a solid metal grille and pulled on it. Sure enough, it was fixed firmly in place. He ordered the janitor be brought forward and the man stood befor
e him trembling like a cornered rabbit.
‘What’s in here?’
‘It goes right up into the old choir loft but it’s never used, so far as I know.’
‘Open it.’
‘I don’t have that key. I’m not sure where it is. Like I say it’s never really used. No, not really.’
‘Private, point your rifle at this man’s head.’
The chosen soldier drew the bolt of his rifle, took a step back, shouldered the gun and aimed it directly at the janitor’s head. The flinching fellow tried to move out of harm’s way but only succeeded in pressing himself back against the stone wall. The other soldiers quickly moved out of the range of possible ricochet.
‘Take the key out of your pocket and open the grille. If you do not I will order him to shoot you here and I will simply have it blown open with explosive.’
‘Yes, yes,’ mumbled the quaking janitor and he instantly forgot his evasions. The bunch of keys was produced once more and, despite quivering hands, the correct one selected. The lock turned easily and the grille swung open in front of them.
A loud knock made the soldiers start, then a second, which was followed swiftly by another, each one preceded by a rolling sound. It took Pannwitz another two knocks, closer together this time, to realise what was happening. A heavy metal object was rolling down the stairs towards them, thumping against each one in turn as it descended.
‘Grenade!’ he screamed and threw himself behind a bench.
The soldiers who reacted slower than the Gestapo man actually witnessed the hand grenade landing at their feet before it exploded in their faces, sending a flurry of mutilated men flailing in all directions.
Before the noise of the blast diminished, Kubiš was on his feet, firing short machine gun bursts from the choir loft into the backs of fleeing soldiers, pitching them over like skittles where the bullets found their marks. From their positions either side of him, Bublík and Opálka fired too, creating a lethal crossfire, which had the Germans diving for cover. The less disciplined ran in a blind panic before they were inevitably picked off by the murderous hail. Kubiš had a moment to hope God would understand and forgive the sacrilegious devastation of his church.
Hunting the Hangman Page 24
