The Darkest Hour

by Roberta Kagan

  Physical training: very good.

  Fieldcraft: good.

  Close combat: very good.

  Explosives: good 86%.

  Communication: very good 12 words/min in Morse code.

  Reports: very good.

  And in conclusion: A natural born leader.

  It was that “natural born leader” who was standing over his panting frame now and giving him the warmest, toothy grin.

  “I have to watch my back,” Jozef offered Jan his outstretched arm to help him get up. “You’re treading right on my heels.”

  “I wish I were,” Jan grumbled under his breath and allowed his friend to pull him upward.

  He also wished he had a healthy, competitive rivalry with Jozef, like sportsmen do, just to motivate him to do better, to run faster. But Jozef, from the very first day that they met, became not only a close friend but almost a brother figure for Jan; a brother, who was always there, who pushed him when he couldn’t push himself any further, who encouraged him when he lost all faith in himself… They were complete opposites. Jan – calm, reserved, and serious; Jozef – the soul of the company; yet, both had more in common than they cared to admit. Both were orphans; no wives, no children, no families to mourn them once they perished from the face of the earth, ravaged by the war and hatred. Both shared the same keen sense of justice which begged to be restored; both weren’t afraid to die in the name of it. Well, almost. Jan taught himself to think that he wasn’t.

  Jozef promised him, with some inexplicable certainty, that their native Czechoslovakia would breathe freely in just a few years and that it would be them, the SOE-trained Czech Resistance fighters, who would make it happen. And Jan, eventually persuaded by his words; caught the contagious bug of the fighting spirit that seemed to never leave his comrade and soon began believing, as well, that all those wonderful predictions would most definitely come true just because Jozef said so. And Jozef was rarely wrong.

  It’s not that Jan was a coward; quite the contrary. A former military man, he joined the underground in Krakow as soon as the Czechoslovak army was dissolved and even fought in Algiers together with the Free French, and having a Croix de Guerre to show for it. Unlike him, Jozef, whom Jan met after running to England, hardly ever spoke about the Czechoslovak Army, to which he also belonged and which had lost its battle before it even began. At first, Jan disliked him immensely; then – looked up to him. Jozef was only a year older than him but what eternal wisdom, what fire burned behind his piercing blue eyes! With him, Jan was ready to go into hell itself if needed.

  “Hungry?” Jozef amicably slapped Jan’s shoulder, sending a faint cloud of dust flying into the crisp autumn air. No wonder, after crawling on their stomachs for nearly two hours under barbed wire and sand pits, from which they had to shoot at the moving targets. Jozef “killed” all of his; Jan only “injured” three out of five.

  “Starving,” Jan replied with a grin and passed a dirty, torn hand over his forehead, only now noticing the stinging sensation as the lacerated skin rubbed against the sand, which was stuck to his face. “Damn it. I thought I cut myself while getting out of the ‘minefield’.”

  Jozef only snorted and poked two fingers through the sleeve of his uniform. “Not you alone.”

  That made Jan feel slightly better. Even though Jozef was still the leader of their group, known to the SOE as Free Czechoslovaks, he was still only a human, Jan reminded himself. Maybe, one day he, Jan, would indeed come first. After all, as Jozef himself always said, the only man who stands in your way is you.

  They showered and wolfed down their generous meal, then played cards and shared a few beers, also generously supplied by the SOE. It wasn’t bad here by any means, but as the evening settled down and the silence grew around them, invisible, unspoken questions began tormenting every single man, it seemed. How many were tortured by the Gestapo butchers while they compared their scratches and bruises received during the training? How many lost their freedom while they were enjoying their game of cards in the safety of their allies? How many died, while they lived?

  Invariably, they fell into a dim gloom and welcomed the relief of the lights-out at ten, when they could lie and stare into a black ceiling – as cold and morose as their thoughts.

  Villa Bellasis, SOE training camp. 26 December 1941

  * * *

  ‘My mission involves being sent to my native country with another number of the Czechoslovak army in order to commit an act of sabotage or of terrorism in a place and according to methods which will depend upon the circumstances that we find there. I will do all that is in my power to obtain the results desired, not only in my native country but also beyond it. I will work with all my heart and soul to be able to successfully complete this mission, for which I have volunteered.’

  “You have to understand that once you sign up for this, there will be no turning back,” a stern-looking Colonel moved two identical papers towards Jan and Jozef. “This mission, with which we are entrusting you, is of the utmost historical importance. The assassination of someone of Heydrich’s level is unprecedented and unthinkable to the Germans, just like his current policies in our homeland, are to us. We must avenge all of our comrades, executed in cold blood on his orders. We must demonstrate to the Germans that they aren’t as invincible as they imagine themselves to be. But as significant as your task is, the risk is even more substantial. We’ll drop you over Czechoslovakia and provide you with everything we can in order for the mission to succeed. However, it is of utmost importance that you act as a single, two-men cell without revealing the details of your mission to anyone, including your comrades from the local Resistance. They will provide you with shelter, but that’s where the collaboration must end. The stakes are too high to risk exposure, in case someone with such dangerous knowledge falls into the hands of the Gestapo. Once you get a coded go-ahead from London, through a radio operator in Prague, you’ll have to rely on your own skill and improvise according to the plan you will have to work out yourselves. And, I have to say this so that my conscience is clear before you two; there is a very slim chance that once you implement whatever plan you agree upon, we’ll be able to organize an escape route for you in time. If you manage to escape on your own – good for you. We’ll gladly take you back. If not…”

  He only pursed his lips in a certain way instead of finishing the sentence.

  “Please, do consider this carefully and with an open heart. If you have any doubts, anything at all, tell me now.”

  Jan wavered for a moment. Jozef calmly signed under the text.

  Our death sentences, passed through Jan’s mind, for some reason. He hastily chased the thought away and slashed the paper in two with his signature. So be it. They will die, but not before they send ‘The Hangman’ to hell, where he belonged.

  They were given only two days to mentally prepare themselves for their mission, which they chose to spend poring over the map of Prague and quizzing each other on the names of the streets and squares until they memorized nearly an entire city by heart. On the eve of the second, the same Colonel loaded them with all sorts of possible ammunition and shook their hands with a solemn look about him.

  “You are tasked with a mission of the utmost importance. As you know, Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich is one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany as of now. He’s efficient in his methods, ruthless, extremely intelligent, and can’t be underestimated. A man like him will give you only one chance to kill him; if you don’t use it, he’ll kill you and it won’t be a fast and merciful death. Please, do be careful.”

  “We will,” Jozef assured him with envious confidence.

  A British NCO was summoned in, who immediately ordered the Czechs to strip naked, with a typical British coolness. Efficiently and drily, he laid out a choice of clothing before the pair, pointing at each piece of clothing and almost proudly remarking that everything was Czechoslovak-made. Suits, pants, shirts, underwear, matches, toothpaste – the SOE appeared to have
taken everything into account, Jan remarked to himself with a healthy dose of amusement.

  “No need for anyone to find anything remotely reminiscent of England on you, gentlemen,” the NCO commented in his characteristic matter-of-fact tone before collecting their belongings and disappearing behind the door.

  Instead of dismissing them, the Colonel cleared his throat and began aimlessly searching for something in his papers, stacks and stacks of which littered his desk, together with a military map and their point of destination – a tiny red flag in the middle of nowhere.

  “Is there anything else, sir?” Jozef appeared to correctly interpret his superior’s fumbling for the latter undoubtedly couldn’t bring himself to articulate the right words himself.

  Looking at the two uneasily, the Colonel moved two blank sheets of paper towards the Czechs.

  “If you would like to make your wills, we still have a couple of hours before the plane takes off.” His words tumbled out in a hasty murmur, painful and apologetic.

  Jozef stepped forward, dipped the pen in ink without further hesitation and started writing. Jan stepped away, hoping that the gesture would come out natural, as though he was merely giving Jozef space, not trying to desperately work his way out of the room, the walls of which closed in on him like those of a coffin, dark and suffocating. The fire barely crackled in the fireplace, and yet Jan’s shirt was damp with sweat. Some assassin, he mentally cursed himself.

  He quickly jotted down his will that night as well, wondering at how little he appeared to have in this world at his twenty-eight years of age. ‘My leather jacket to my brother in Moravia… bicycle to my cousin… Please, look after my family in the event of my death.’ No money, no property, no children to carry his name. Not even a girlfriend to cry over his death. What a sad way to leave this world.

  Jozef made a joke about Jan being some friend – I thought that the bicycle was mine? Jan chuckled, slapped his shoulder awkwardly, wiped a quick tear from the corner of the eye while no one was looking, crossed out the words that swam before his eyes and added the new ones. ‘The bicycle to Josef Gabčík if he’s alive at the moment of my passing.’ Now, all better. They can laugh about it and this means they aren’t too afraid. The Colonel heaved a sigh of relief collecting the two papers with only a few lines on them; thought of saying something but changed his mind at the last moment. Just a formal “Good luck to you both” at the Tangmere aerodrome belonging to the secret RAF base in Sussex, and a sharp salute to seal the deal. He would never see them again – alive, that is; he was sure of it.

  Jan hid trembling hands under his legs on the heavily laden Halifax, as it was making its slow progress over the Channel, then Occupied France and finally – Nazi Germany, stubbornly navigating its way despite searchlights springing to life here and there and anti-aircraft batteries probing the sky around it and missing it only by some miracle, no doubt.

  “Night-fighters,” Jozef spoke to no one in particular somewhere over Germany. More bullets whizzing by, more nervous glances among the nine parachutists; two more groups were to be dropped out further along the way for their respective missions. The pilot took to the clouds and lost the fighters – again, by some incredibly lucky chance. Jan was nursing some strange inward hope that Messerschmitts would just end them all here and now and he wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.

  “We can’t die tonight,” Jozef announced with some owl-like wisdom around him. “Fate wouldn’t allow us to die before we complete our mission. Heydrich’s appointment as the Protector has perverted the very sense of the word. He’s not the Protector; we are. We are coming to restore the correct order of things, how they should be. When the strong protect the weak, not when the strong bully everyone who goes against them into blind submission, or hangs them regardless of age, sex, class or origin. No, we can’t die. Otherwise, this whole world won’t make sense to me anymore.”

  Jan nodded but suddenly, as though after Jozef’s putting it into words, the whole idea of the assassination appeared almost insane. Them? Two ordinary men from the Czech Resistance kill the most feared man in all of Europe? It seemed just as feasible as assassinating Hitler himself. Perhaps, Hitler would prove to be an easier target; in Jan’s eyes, Hitler was a madman. Heydrich was an evil genius, a mastermind behind all of Himmler’s rabid ideas of the brutal police force and eliminating anyone they proclaimed, “an enemy of the state.”

  Jan had a nightmare the night before, in which he was shooting at the Reich Protector until there were no more bullets in his gun and Heydrich just stood before him and laughed in his face, that devilish look about his eyes paralyzing him in his place with its glacial, ice-blue fire. Jan woke up, drenched in sweat and couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night. What if they fail? What if Heydrich indeed doesn’t die, for whatever stupid, inconceivable reason? But they were already falling through the very real rabbit hole into the opaque darkness of the night over their native Czechoslovakia and once their feet dove deeply into the snow, there was no turning back. The plane had dissolved into that velvet obscurity as if it had never existed, and only the two silky clouds of their parachutes proved to Jan that he hadn’t dreamt it all.

  Jan wrestled with the parachute which had covered him entirely until he finally untangled himself from its grip. Knee-deep in the snow, he frantically turned his head from one side to the other in a futile attempt to locate his comrade.

  “Jozef!” He probed the still, crisp air in a soft voice and then shouted, as the panic started to set in. “Jozef!! Where are you?”

  “Scream a little louder; I don’t think that our goddamned plane roused enough Gestapo agents around here from their beds!” A gruff voice came from above him.

  Only then Jan saw him, caught in the cobweb of branches of a tree; Jozef, busily working his way out of the parachute. Jan laughed in relief, nearly dancing around the tree as Jozef was making his way down, until the latter proclaimed in his usual calm tone, as if the announcement was nothing significant, “I think I broke my ankle. Could you catch me if I jump, so I don’t land on my foot and make it worse?”

  Of course, he could; he was taller, sturdier, stronger. Yet the Colonel had appointed Jozef as the leader of their small, two-man squad as if sensing some hesitation about Jan and rightfully so. Jan outstretched his arms.

  “Go ahead.”

  Jozef barely weighed anything – slim, wiry, and unafraid of anything.

  “Can you walk?”

  “I’m going to have to.” Jozef circled his arm around Jan’s shoulders, carefully probing his way in the snow with his good leg. “I don’t think he dropped us in the right place. Did you see the village while we were landing? Right near the graveyard where we are now.”

  “Yes. I thought it was strange, that he dropped us so close to the populated area.”

  “Well, the instructions were that he was supposed to drop us near Pilsen, in a forest. Does this look like a forest to you?” Josef suddenly burst into laughter. “And yet, just my luck, I encountered the only tree that stood in the middle of a clearing. Nothing to say this started out well.”

  “What are we going to do now?” Jan was already warm from adrenaline, still coursing his body after the jump and from both Jozef’s weight and the weight of the ammunition that he carried for the both of them; one backpack in hand, another – slung over his shoulder.

  “First of all, get as far away from the village as possible. The probability that they heard the engines of the plane is one hundred percent. Let’s hope that they’re all good, conscientious Czechs, but if there’s at least one pro-German among them…”

  Jozef didn’t finish. Jan refused to even think what would be then.

  “One step at a time now, Jan. From now on, it’s one little step at a time.”

  Chapter 3

  Wannsee, Suburb of Berlin. January 20, 1942

  Reinhard confidently navigated his plane toward the narrow landing strip despite the light snow that had started to fall. Blizzards didn�
�t bother him; on the contrary, he treated the force of nature as one of his opponents, proving to it and to himself, that his skill as a pilot was more than a match for some petty weather conditions. Reichsführer Himmler couldn’t stand that trait of his, that almost suicidal desire, at times, to prove himself to no one in particular. Reinhard chuckled under his breath when he recalled the day when his superior wouldn’t stop grumbling about Heydrich’s escapades in the Fighter Squadron 77, which he had joined in absolute secrecy and without even considering consulting him first. Himmler, the sickly hypochondriac with constant headaches and weak nerves, couldn’t tolerate the awful thought of losing his second-in-command, his best man, his protégé, and a good friend.

  “I thought you didn’t have secrets from me,” he muttered, with a shade of offense in his voice, glaring tragically at Reinhard when the latter had informed him of leaving for the front as part of the Luftwaffe, for the first time.

  Reinhard only shrugged in response, utterly indifferent and almost bored with Himmler’s sentiments. You thought wrong, then.

  And then Reinhard’s Messerschmitt was hit on the Eastern front; he bailed out behind the enemy lines and Reichsführer nearly had a heart attack at the mere thought of the Chief of the RSHA falling into the hands of the Russians and therefore the NKVD, who would undoubtedly celebrate such an occasion by demonstrating to their German guest their best third-degree interrogation techniques. And Reinhard, meanwhile, wandered around the forest for a couple of days, miraculously managing to escape the feared partisans, together with the Soviet Army; found his way back to the frontline and happily gave himself up to the German patrol. Name and rank? They had to be vigilant; Reinhard understood and offered them his name and full title. They exchanged glances, scowled for a few moments until one of them snorted with laughter, slapping his comrade on his shoulder. Poor fighter ace fellow must have suffered some mighty brain damage to fancy himself the Chief of the Reich Main Security Office!