Beauty and the Beast

The Gestapo

As I said before and will continue to say many time throughout my story, you were smart, Reinhard, smart and cunning. I will acknowledge that. The sad thing was that you used your intellect and your knowledge of people's emotions in the ghastliest ways possible. 
You loved to toy with people, to harness their weaknesses and cruelly manipulate them. You would dash their hopes and crush their dreams before their eyes, and revel in their misery. Sometimes, you did it for their own benefit. Other times, such as in my case, you didn't have anything to gain. You did it simply because you could, because you liked to prove to yourself that your power had no limits and no boundaries. You liked to show yourself that you could not only exercise physical and political control over a people, but that you could stretch the hand of your power beyond physical control, and subjugate people mentally and emotionally.

Being the naive seventeen year old I had been in those days, I was blissfully ignorant of all this. I had no idea what that encounter on the street with you, your SS man, and your horse would mean for my future. I couldn't have possibly known what disasters your entry into my life that day would spell for me.

It so happens that you picked the day my friend's older brother got married to set your sinister plans for me in motion. Which brings me to an important question: did you deliberately pick that day because it was special to me? Or was it just a coincidence?
I firmly believe that it was the former, and I believe I had no reason to think otherwise.
Your Gestapo had spies all over the Protectorate; in Panenske Brezany no less. They knew everything there was to know about everyone--there wasn't a single detail that they weren't privy to.
I probably only played the fool just so I could convince myself that I wasn't in danger, that I wasn't officially of importance to the most powerful man in Czechoslovakia. It was just such of a horrifying thought back then that turning the other cheek really was the only recourse.
Not that doing that helped my situation any.

In any event, I had completely forgotten about ever meeting you. In fact, I was sort of proud of myself, as preposterous as it seems, for having survived a run-in with Reinhard Heydrich, the creator of the misery of the Czech people.

I was so naive back then. I had no clue I was far from off the hook. I had no idea that I was slowly being lifted out of the frying pan and about to be flung headlong into the fire.

There would be no escaping you for me, anyway, even if I had known. You were an integral part of everyone's life whether they liked it or not. Footage of you flooded the newsreels in the cinemas of Prague, and the few speeches you made were broadcast over the radio. The newspapers were suffused with picture after picture of you.

But in Prague, no one ever saw you because you were locked away in the Hradcany Castle with the rest of the Czech bureaucracy. We, the inhabitants of Panenské Brezany, had to suffer direct exposure to you, because you lived among us, albeit on a hill that overlooked our village. Like the town of Pompeii encircling Mount Vesuvius, our village hugged the hill your chateau was perched on like a ominous albino gargoyle. It was no secret in the village that numerous Czechs were sent there to work as servants for your wife, Lina Heydrich.

For all my looking the other way, I couldn't shake the feeling that something about that encounter was very, very wrong. Why had your SS man taken my name and address alone, and not that of my friends? He hadn't even taken a second glance at them. Moreover, why had he taken my information at all? I racked my brain, trying to remember if I had done or said anything inflammatory about you or the German government, but could remember nothing—and for good reason, because my crime was far from having said or done anything anti-Nazi.
My only crime I had committed, the repercussions of which would soon manifest themselves, was that I was beautiful.

~~~

"We ought to walk faster, it's getting dark and the ceremony will be starting soon." Maria teetered precariously on the pavement in her sky high D'Orsay heels as she turned to face Libena and I, who were slowly but surely making our way along the sidewalk in equally high shoes. "These shoes aren't helping matters, either."
I lifted my head to scan our surroundings. My gaze travelled up and down the dark, deserted road that stretched out before us. The street lamps—by now the only source of light around—suffused everything in a eerie, pale yellow glow. The air was still and silent—every now and then a slight breeze picked up, only to die down just as soon as it had come. It was as if even the wind was afraid to blow freely in this country languishing under your rule.
There wasn't even light visible through the windows of houses, which struck me as odd. Then again, I supposed there wasn't really anything worth staying up for anymore, when everyone had only a day of grueling work ahead of them.
Before you, before Hitler, no one went to sleep this early. The streets were never this deserted,
especially on weekends, and people stayed up long into the night. Our village bubbled with happiness and contentment that was only tempered by the German invasion.
I looked up for what I didn't know would be my last glimpse of freedom. Maria was standing a few feet away from me, her hands on her hips impatiently as she watched Libena and I guide each other along the sidewalk. The yellow light from the street lamp bathed her in its warm glow, turning her jet black hair silver. Next to me, Libena muttered something about beauty being painful as she hopped over a crack in the ground beneath our feet. If I had known that that night would be the end of all things normal in our friendship, I would have held onto both of them forever and never let go.

The arches and balls of my feet ached—that was my first time walking in such high shoes. I couldn't wait to get to the wedding hall and take them off under the table. But I would never get there...

The loud screech of tires tearing across pavement made the three of us jump in unison. I instinctively grabbed onto Libena, who swayed like a toppling tree but managed to stay upright as a shiny black Mercedes pulled up to the curb and screeched to a halt centimeters away from us.
My pulse stuttered and jumped as two SS men, each holding a shiny Parabellum pistol,  swaggered out of the car towards us. As the glow of the streetlamps washed over their face, my heart leapt into my throat when I saw that one of them was the SS man that had taken my name and address.
"Sophie Gabcikova." He put contemptuous emphasis on my last name. "You're coming with us."
That should have been my first warning sign that something was wrong—the nature of the so-called "arrest". From what I had heard, a typical Gestapo arrest comprised of a group of plainclothes officers beating down the victim's door with the butts of their guns and hustling them into vehicles to be carted away somewhere. But these men spoke to me like I was simply being called in for a harmless interrogation.
"You've got the wrong person." Ever the lifesaver, Maria valiantly attempted to come to my rescue. "Her name isn't Sophie Gabcikova. It's  Natalia Morávcova."
The report of the savage backhand the SS man bestowed on her sounded more like a bullwhip cracking against hide than flesh on flesh. Maria yelped in pain and dropped to her knees like a felled sapling, clutching the left side of her face.
The other SS man went for me, forcing Libena and I apart with the barrel of his pistol. He roughly spun me around and shoved his weapon into the small of my back.
"Get moving," he said. It wasn't like I had a choice.
I was shaking so hard in my heels I had painfully twisted my ankle three times before I got to the car, the momentum of each stumble sending me into the shoulder of the SS man to my right, eliciting a contemptuous snort from him.
They shoved me into the back of their closed-top Mercedes. One sat on either side of me, their pistols resting casually in their laps with the muzzles angled in my direction. As if I had the guts to try to attack them in an attempt to escape.
The driver floored the gas and the engine roared to life. The tires squealed as the car lurched forward. I instinctively twisted in my seat and peered out the tiny back window. The last image I had of my friends moments before I was pulled back down and ordered to face forward was Maria clutching her cheek as she leaned heavily on Libena's shoulder, the two of them staring helplessly after the departing Mercedes.