Now they are ready. Colonel Moravec waits for them next to the Halifax, whose engines are already running. There are five other parachutists in the plane with them, but they are going to different places on different missions. Moravec shakes Kubiš’s hand and wishes him good luck. But when he turns toward Gabčík, the little Slovak asks if they can have a quick word in private. Moravec cringes inwardly. He fears a last-minute withdrawal and suddenly regrets what he said to the two boys when he first chose them that they shouldn’t hesitate to tell him frankly if they didn’t feel up to the task. He’d even added that there was nothing shameful in changing your mind. He still believes this, but standing next to the waiting airplane is not the ideal time to hear it. He’d have to get Kubiš off the plane and delay the departure while he found a replacement for Gabčík. The mission would be postponed till God knows when. Gabčík begins with a few carefully phrased words that don’t bode well: “Colonel, I’m very embarrassed to ask this…” But what comes next allays his boss’s fears: “I’ve left an unpaid bill for ten pounds at our restaurant. Could you possibly pay it for me?” Moravec is so relieved that he says in his memoirs he could do nothing more than nod. Gabčík shakes his hand. “You can count on us, Colonel. We’ll fulfill our mission exactly as ordered.” Those were his last words before disappearing into the cabin.
The two men wrote down their final wishes just before they took off, and I have these magnificent, hastily scribbled documents in front of me now. Covered in inkstains and crossings-out, they are almost identical. Both are dated December 28, 1941; both are divided in two parts; both have a few extra lines added to them, written diagonally across the page. Gabčík and Kubiš ask that their families be looked after in the event of their deaths. To that end, each gives an address—in Slovakia, in Moravia. Both men are orphans, and neither has a wife or child. But I know Gabčík has sisters, and Kubiš brothers. Both ask that their English girlfriends be informed if they die. Lorna Ellison is named in Gabčík’s will, and Edna Ellison in Kubiš’s. The two men had grown as close as brothers, so they went out with sisters. A photo of Lorna has reached us, slipped inside Gabčík’s military records—a young woman with dark curly hair. He will never see her again.
I have no evidence that Gabčík and Kubiš’s clothes were provided by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive). In fact, it’s more likely that this was dealt with by Moravec’s Czech services. So there’s no reason why the NCO who looks after them should be British. Oh, what a pain …
The general kommissar of Byelorussia, based in Minsk, complains about the actions of Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen. He deplores the fact that the systematic extermination of the Jews is depriving him of much-needed manpower. He also protests to Heydrich about decorated Jewish war veterans being deported to his ghetto in Minsk. He submits a list of Jews to be freed while denouncing the Einsatzgruppen’s indiscriminate killings. This is the reply he receives:
You will agree with me that, in the third year of the war, there are more important tasks for the war effort—both for the police and the security services—than running around trying to look after the needs of the Jews, wasting time drawing up lists, and distracting all my colleagues from more urgent business. If I ordered an inquiry into the people on your list, it would only be to prove—once and for all, and in writing—that such attacks are baseless. I regret still having to provide this kind of justification, six and a half years after the decree of the Nuremberg racial laws.
Well, you can’t accuse him of not being clear.
That night, at an altitude of two thousand feet, the huge Halifax aircraft roared out of the sky above the winter countryside of Czechoslovakia. The four airscrews churned through the drifts of low broken cloud, flailing them back against the wet black flanks of the machine, and in the cold fuselage Jan Kubis and Josef Gabchik stared down at their homeland through the open, coffin-shaped exit hatch cut in the floor.
This is the opening paragraph of Alan Burgess’s novel
Automatically they checked the release boxes and static lines of their parachute harnesses. Within minutes they were to plunge down through that darkness to the earth below, knowing that they were the first parachutists to come back to Czechoslovakia, and knowing also that their mission was as unique and hazardous as any that had yet been conceived.