Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,88

could do nothing without examining him in person.”

* * *

Why did people always believe in the wrong things? Anna wondered. They looked past the truth and went straight for what was not real and would never be real. Imagine someone like Albert Einstein or Louis Pasteur or Marie Curie believing in tarot cards. But then she remembered that Madame Curie had attended séances in the hope of contacting her husband, Pierre, after his death in a road accident. Anna remembered also that her mother, a medical doctor and scientist, believed spilled salt meant bad luck and a broken mirror foretold disaster. Franz sometimes teased Magdalena for being superstitious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, her mother quoted to him. That was Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was full of ghosts. Even if you did not believe in ghosts, they were there, in the dark, sometimes just visible in the corner of your eye. All the houses in the Golden Lane were said to be haunted. When she and Reina had walked into the fortune-teller’s house, Reina had tripped over a pair of shoes by the door. The fortune-teller had put them away under a couch. Later, when she and Reina were leaving, Reina said, “Did you see the pillow and blanket on the couch? And that scrap of bread on a plate on the dresser? Someone else is there, in hiding. Perhaps a lover? I’m sure of it. And yet she is an enigma, isn’t she, and so thin and pale, like one of Aunt Magdalena’s patients. We should take her some food, don’t you think, Anna?”

* * *

On May 27, 1942, the acting Reich protector’s car was hit by a grenade in an assassination attempt. The assassins had been trained in England and parachuted into a village outside Prague and were concealed in the homes of partisans in the countryside and in Prague. The assassination attempt went wrong. A gun jammed and failed to fire. The grenade missed Heydrich and damaged the car. But debris from the explosion, splinters of metal, fragments of the car’s upholstery, had penetrated Heydrich’s side. Emergency surgery was performed that day and his spleen was removed. Hitler sent doctors from Berlin to take over Heydrich’s care, and it was expected Heydrich would recover. But he developed septicemia, which his doctors tried to treat with blood transfusions and high doses of Prontosil, a drug Anna’s mother said had limited efficacy treating bacterial infections. The antibiotic drug penicillin could perhaps have cured Heydrich, but while a small quantity was available in England, Germany of course had no access to it. The acting Reich protector fell into a coma and died on June 4, 1942.

From Berlin, Hitler ordered severe reprisals. Prague was sealed off; no one could get in or out. Prime Minister Emil Hácha was arrested and imprisoned. The former prime minister, General Alois Eliáš, was executed.

The parachutists who carried out the assassination took refuge in the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius. One of their comrades turned informant and gave the Gestapo information that led to the storming of the church. The two parachutists, from the Czech army-in-exile, escaped, in the end, by shooting themselves.

Franz said the parachutists, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gačbík, would be honored and remembered long after Heydrich was forgotten.

The reprisals for Heydrich’s killing continued. The village of Lidice, twenty kilometers west of Prague, was wrongly believed to have sheltered the assassins. As a consequence, all the men over the age of sixteen were shot, and the women and children were transported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Many of Franz’s friends—students at the university, some of his professors—were arrested and executed. Workers at a Skoda automobile factory were shot to death in front of the other workers. In less than four months, two thousand people in the protectorate were executed. Anyone suspected of approving of the assassination—of even thinking of approving—was arrested and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Anna’s father was questioned by the Gestapo at Petschek Palace, but he was released. Uncle Tomaš was arrested and detained. As an accountant who was employed in the Reich’s administration offices at the Hradčany he was suspected of having supplied details of the Reich protector’s itinerary on May 27, specifically the time he was to have been driven to the airport to fly to Berlin. Anna’s aunt Vivian went to Gestapo headquarters every day, but she was told, pardon her, the same