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.
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
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 …
Heydrich is wrong about the Czech Resistance—it’s not dead yet. In 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.
So, to carry out their mission, the two parachutists must surrender themselves to this horrifying lottery. They must choose a date with no idea whether Heydrich will be escorted. Whether their mission is extremely risky, or whether it’s actually a suicide mission.
Riding bicycles, the two men keep making the same journey—from Heydrich’s home to the castle, from curve to curve. Heydrich lives in Panenské Břežany, a little spot in the suburbs a quarter of an hour by car from the city center. One part of the journey is particularly isolated: a long straight line with no houses nearby. If they managed to immobilize the car they could shoot Heydrich here without anyone seeing. They consider stopping the car with a steel cable strung tightly across the road. But afterward, how would they get away? They’d need their own car or motorbike. And the Czech Resistance has neither. No, it has to be done in the middle of town, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a crowd. They need a curve in the road. Gabčík’s and Kubiš’s thoughts are curved and twisting. They dream of the ideal curve.
And they end up finding it.
Well, “ideal” is perhaps not the right word.