HHhH

by Laurent Binet

  On the other hand, I’m almost certain that the joke which is immediately spread around town has its origin here. I imagine someone in the crowd—probably an old man, a guardian of the Czech spirit—saying in a loud voice, so that everyone around him can hear: “Poor Hitler! He must be really ill if he needs a whole train to make him better…” That’s straight out of the good soldier Švejk.

  186

  Lying on his little iron bed, Jozef Gabčík listens to the sound of the tramway bell outside as the tram approaches Karlovo náměstí—Charles Square. Very close to here is Resslova Street, which leads down to the river: the street still knows nothing of the tragedy whose setting it will soon provide. A few shafts of sunlight force their way through the closed shutters of the apartment where, these days, Gabčík lives in hiding. From time to time you can hear the floorboards creak in the corridor, or on the landing, or in a neighbor’s apartment. Gabčík is alert but calm, as always. His eyes stare at the ceiling while in his mind he draws maps of Europe. In one map, Czechoslovakia has its old borders back. In another, the brown plague has spread across the Channel, attaching Great Britain to one of the swastika’s arms. But Gabčík, like Kubiš, tells anyone who’ll listen that the war will be over in less than a year—and he probably believes it too. And not over in the way the Germans want it to be, obviously. Their first fatal error was declaring war on the USSR. Their second was declaring war on the United States in order to honor their alliance with Japan. It’s quite ironic that, if France was defeated in 1940 because she didn’t honor her promises to Czechoslovakia in 1938, Germany should now be about to lose the war because she did honor hers to Japan. But one year! In retrospect, this is touchingly optimistic.

  I’m sure these political musings occupy Gabčík’s mind, and the minds of his friends; I’m sure they have endless discussions at night, when they can’t sleep, when they’re able to relax a little by chatting. As long as they can forget the possibility of a nocturnal visit from the Gestapo. As long as they can stop themselves jumping at the slightest noise in the street, on the staircase, in the house. As long as they don’t hear imaginary bells ringing in their heads, and yet are still able to listen out for the sound of real bells ringing.

  This is another age—one where, each day, people eagerly look forward not to sports results but to news from the Russian front.

  The Russian front, however, is not uppermost in Gabčík’s mind. The single most important thing in the war today is his mission. How many people believe this? Gabčík and Kubiš are convinced. Valčík too. And Colonel Moravec. And President Beneš, for the moment. And me. That’s all, I think. In any case, only a handful of men know about Operation Anthropoid’s objective. But even among this handful, there are some who disapprove.

  This is true of certain parachutists working in Prague, and also of certain Resistance leaders—because they fear the reprisals that will be unleashed if the operation succeeds. Gabčík had a tedious argument with them the other day. They wanted to persuade him to give up his mission, or at least to change his target—to choose a prominent Czech collaborator, Emanuel Moravec, for instance, instead of Heydrich. This fear of the German! It’s like a man who beats his dog: the dog may sometimes refuse to obey his master, but he will never turn on him.

  Lieutenant Bartos wanted to cancel the operation. Sent by London to carry out other Resistance missions, Bartos is the highest-ranking officer among the Prague parachutists. But here, rank means nothing. The Anthropoid team, consisting only of Gabčík and Kubiš, received its instructions from London—from President Beneš himself. There are no more orders to be given now. The mission has to be accomplished, and that’s that. Gabčík and Kubiš are men, and everyone who rubbed shoulders with them has emphasized their human qualities: their generosity, their good nature, their dedication. But Anthropoid is a machine.

  Bartos asked London to stop Anthropoid. In reply he received a coded message, indecipherable to everyone except Gabčík and Kubiš. Lying on his little iron bed, Gabčík holds the text in his hand. Nobody has found this document. But in a few encrypted lines, their destiny is mapped out: the objective remains the same. The mission is confirmed. Heydrich must die. Outside, creaking metallically, a tram moves away.

  187

  SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, the leader of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C—the group that so zealously performed its task at Babi Yar—is going mad. At night, in Kiev, his car passes the scene of his crimes. In the headlights’ glare he contemplates the staggering spectacle of that ravine of the damned, and he is like Macbeth, haunted by his victims’ ghosts. The dead of Babi Yar are not easily forgotten, because the earth in which they’re buried is itself alive. Smoke rises from it. As the decomposing corpses produce gas bubbles that escape upward, clods jump out like popping champagne corks. The stench is foul. Blobel, laughing dementedly, explains to his guests: “Here lie my thirty thousand Jews!” And he makes a sweeping gesture that takes in the whole immense gurgling belly of the ravine.

  If it goes on like this, the corpses of Babi Yar will be the death of him. At the end of his tether, Blobel travels all the way to Berlin to plead with Heydrich in person to transfer him elsewhere. He gets a suitable welcome: “So you’re feeling sick, are you? You spineless queer. You’re no good for anything but selling crockery.” But Heydrich quickly calms down. The man in front of him is a drunken wreck, no longer capable of carrying out the work entrusted to him. It would be pointless and dangerous to keep him in that job against his will. “Go and see Gruppenführer Müller. Tell him you want to go on vacation. He’ll remove you from your command in Kiev.”

  188

  The working-class district of Žižkov in eastern Prague is supposed to have the highest concentration of bars in the whole city. It also has lots of churches, as you’d expect in the “city of a hundred bells.” In one of these churches, a priest recalls that a young couple came to see him “when the tulips were in flower.” The man was short, with thin lips and piercing eyes. The young woman, I know, was charming and full of joie de vivre. They seemed to be in love. They wanted to get married, but not straightaway. The date they wanted to book was precise but uncertain: “two weeks after the war ends.”

  189

  I wonder how Jonathan Littell, in his novel The Kindly Ones, knows that Blobel had an Opel. If Blobel really drove an Opel, then I bow before his superior research. But if it’s a bluff, that weakens the whole book. Of course it does! It’s true that the Nazis were supplied in bulk by Opel, and so it’s perfectly plausible that Blobel possessed, or used, a vehicle of that make. But plausible is not known. I’m driveling, aren’t I? When I tell people that, they think I’m mental. They don’t see the problem.

  190

  Valčík and Ata (the Moravecs’ young son) have just had a miraculous escape during a police inspection that ended in the deaths of two parachutists. They are hiding out in the concierge’s apartment and telling him the story of their misadventure. I could tell this story, too, but what would it add, I wonder, to have yet another scene from a spy novel? Modern novels are all about narrative economy, that’s just how it is, and mine can’t keep ignoring this parsimonious logic. So, basically, all you need to know is that it was because of Valčík’s cool head and his perfect grasp of the situation that he and Ata were not arrested or killed.

  Seeing how strongly this adventure and he himself have impressed the teenage boy, Valčík tells him helpfully:

  “You see this wooden box, Ata? The Krauts could beat it till it started to talk. But you, no matter how much they beat you, you must say nothing. Nothing, you understand?”

  That line, by contrast, is not at all superfluous to my story.

  191

  You might have guessed that I was a bit disturbed by the publication of Jonathan Littell’s novel, and by its success. And even if I can comfort myself by saying that our projects are not the same, I am forced to admit that the subject matter is fairly similar. I’m reading it at the mome
nt, and each page gives me the urge to write something about it. I have to suppress this urge. All I will say is that there’s a description of Heydrich at the beginning of the book, from which I will quote only one line: “His hands seemed too long, like nervous algae attached to his arms.” I don’t know why, but I really like that image.

  192

  This is what I think: inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, in the words of my brother-in-law, with whom I’ve discussed all this: It’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.

  193

  Prague in 1942 looks like a black-and-white photo. The passing men wear crumpled hats and dark suits, while the women wear those fitted skirts that make them all look like secretaries. I know this—I have the photos on my desk. All right, no, I admit it. I was exaggerating a bit. They don’t all look like secretaries. Some look like nurses.

  The Czech policemen directing the traffic look strangely like London bobbies with their funny helmets. And just when the Czechs had adopted the system of driving on the right…

  The trams that come and go to the sound of little bells resemble old red-and-white train carriages. (But how can I know that, when the photos are in black and white? I just know, okay!) They all have round headlights that look like lanterns.

  Neon signs decorate the façades of the buildings in Nové Město, advertising beer, brands of clothing, and Bata, the famous shoe manufacturer. In fact, the whole city seems to be covered in writing—and not only adverts. There are Vs everywhere: originally they were symbols of the Czech Resistance, but the Nazis appropriated them as an exhortation to the Reich’s final victory. There are Vs on tramways, on cars, sometimes carved into the ground; Vs everywhere, battling it out between two opposed ideologies.

  Graffiti on a wall: Židi ven—Jews out! In shop windows, a sign to reassure the customers: Čisté árijské obchod—pure Aryan shop. And in a bar: Zada se zdvorile, by se nehovorilo o politice—Customers are kindly requested not to talk politics.

  And then those sinister red posters, written in two languages like all the city’s road signs.

  And that’s without even mentioning flags and other banners. Never has any flag signaled its meaning so powerfully as this black cross in a white circle on a red background.

  Prague in the 1940s didn’t lack style, even if serenity was harder to come by. Looking at the photos, I keep expecting to see Humphrey Bogart among the passersby, or Lida Baarova, the beautiful and famous Czech actress who was Goebbels’s mistress before the war. Strange times.

  I know a restaurant called the Two Cats in the old town, under the arcades: there’s a fresco above it, with two giant cats painted on either side of an arch. But as for the inn the Three Cats, I don’t know where it is or even if it still exists.

  Three men are drinking there, and not talking politics. Instead, they’re talking timetables. Gabčík and Kubiš are sitting at a table opposite a carpenter. But this is no ordinary carpenter. He’s the carpenter at Prague Castle, and in this capacity he sees Heydrich’s Mercedes arrive every day. And every evening, he sees it leave.

  Kubiš is talking to him because the carpenter is a Moravian, like him, and the familiar accent reassures him. “Don’t worry, you’re going to help us before, not during. You’ll be a long way away when we shoot him.”

  Oh, really? So this is Operation Anthropoid’s great secret? Even the carpenter who’s being asked merely to provide the timetable is, without any further ado, told exactly what’s going to happen. I did read somewhere that the parachutists were not always rigorously discreet. Then again, is there any point in trying to conceal everything? The carpenter is hardly going to believe that they’re asking him for Heydrich’s schedule because they’re compiling traffic statistics. But when I reread the carpenter’s testimony I see that Kubiš did tell him, in his best Moravian accent: “Don’t breathe a word of this at home!” Well, as long as he told him…

  So every day the carpenter has to write down the time of Heydrich’s arrival and departure. He also has to note whether or not he’s escorted by another car.

  194

  Heydrich is everywhere: in Prague, in Berlin, and—this month of May—in Paris.

  In the wood-paneled rooms of the Majestic Hotel, the head of the SD gathers the principal field officers of the occupying SS troops to inform them about the operation he’s leading—and which none of his men, nor the world at large, yet know by the name of “the Final Solution.”

  By this time, the mass slaughter perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen has finally been judged too distressing for the soldiers who must carry it out. The old-style killings are gradually phased out in favor of mobile gas chambers. This new system is both simple and ingenious. The Jews have to climb into a truck with the exhaust pipe connected to a length of hose; the victims are then asphyxiated with carbon monoxide. This has two advantages: first, you can kill more Jews at a time; and second, it is easier on the executioners’ nerves. It also produces a curious side effect that the people in charge find amusing: the corpses turn pink. The only inconvenience is that the suffocating victims tend to defecate, so the floor of the truck, smeared with excrement, has to be cleaned after each gassing.

  But these mobile gas chambers, Heydrich explains, are still not sophisticated enough. He says: “Better solutions, more advanced and more productive, are on their way.” Then, his audience hanging on his every word, he adds abruptly: “All the Jews in Europe have been sentenced to death.” Given that the Einsatzgruppen have already executed more than a million Jews, you have to wonder who among his audience hasn’t yet understood this.

  This is the second time I’ve caught Heydrich overdramatizing this kind of statement. When he informed Eichmann, just before Wannsee, that the Führer had decided upon the physical elimination of all the Jews, his colleague was struck by the dramatic silence that followed this announcement. In both cases, even if nothing was really official beforehand, you can’t say it came as a great surprise. More than the pleasure of delivering a scoop, I think Heydrich enjoyed verbalizing the incredible, the unthinkable, as if to give substance to the unimaginable truth. This is what I’ve got to tell you—you already know it, but it’s up to me to tell you, and it’s up to us to do it. The orator, dizzy from speaking the unspeakable. The monster, drunk on the thought of the monstrosities he heralds.

  195

  The carpenter shows them the place where Heydrich gets out of his car each day. Gabčík and Kubiš look around. They pick a spot behind a house where they could wait for him, and from where they could shoot him. But the area is heavily guarded, of course. The carpenter makes it clear they wouldn’t have time to flee, that they would never get out of the castle alive. Gabčík and Kubiš are ready to die—they have been since the beginning, no question about it. But all the same they do want to try to stay alive. They need a plan that gives them a chance of getting away—a small chance but a chance nonetheless—because they both have hopes and dreams for after the war. In the Resistance, among all the Czechs who are risking their lives to help them, there are some brave and pretty young women. I know very few details of my heroes’ love lives, but I do know that after these few months operating secretly in Prague, Gabčík wants to marry Libena, the Fafek family’s daughter, and Kubiš the beautiful Anna Malinova, with her raspberry lips. After the war… They’re not deluding themselves. They know they have only one chance in a thousand of surviving the war. But they want to take that chance. They must, above all, accomplish their mission—absolutely. But that doesn’t mean they want to commit suicide. What a terrible thought.

  The two men walk back down Nerudova, the long street with its alchemists’ shop signs, connecting the castle to Malá Strana. Farther down, the Mercedes will have to go around a nice curve. Could be a spot worth looking at…

  196

  Heydrich is wrong about the Czech Resistance—it’s not dead yet. I
n order to collect the carpenter’s daily bulletin on Heydrich’s movements, they find a ground-floor apartment just below the castle. Whenever necessary (every day, I suppose), the carpenter comes and knocks at the window. A young girl opens it. Two of them take turns; the carpenter thinks they are not only sisters but also the two parachutists’ girlfriends—which they might well be. The carpenter and the girls never exchange a word. The carpenter hands over his piece of paper and leaves. Today, he has written: “9–5 (without).” In other words: 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Without an escort.

  Gabčík and Kubiš are confronted by an insoluble problem. They have no way of knowing in advance whether Heydrich will be escorted by a second car, filled with bodyguards. The statistics based on the carpenter’s reports do not show any fixed pattern. Sometimes without, sometimes with. Without: they’ll have a small chance of getting out alive. With: no chance at all.