Beauty and the Beast

In Hiding

"Josef."
Jan's voice slices through the haze of guilt and shame clouding my mind. "Pull yourself together."
I raise my head off my knees and give him a baleful look. "Are you serious? Pull myself together? After what's happened because of me?"
We had just gotten wind of the obliteration of the villages of Lidice. All the men had been shot, all the women were deported to concentration camps, all the children were also deported except those who were fit to be "Germanized." Apparently the Nazis had received false tip offs that the inhabitants of the village were harboring some—or all—of us.

We hadn't been there, however.
Me, Jan Kubis, Adolf Opalka, Josef Bublik, Josef Valcik, Jaroslav Svarc, and Jan Hruby—the main and secondary executioners of Operation Anthropoid—had been here the whole time, in the crypt of the Karel Boromejsky Methodist Church. It had been our last resort as the city of Prague grew more and more unsafe and the Gestapo conducted search after search. Our presence in the so-called "safe houses"—which really weren't safe anymore—only endangered the occupants of those houses.

The failure of Operation Anthropoid had been all my fault. If only my Sten hadn't jammed. If only I had used cloth as a filler for my briefcase instead of grass, then it wouldn't have found its way into the inner workings of the gun and caused it to malfunction. And if it hadn't jammed, Heydrich would be dead, killed by a spray of lead from my gun, and—

I let my head fall back on my knees. The village of Lidice had been felled for nothing. We had failed in our assignment, and the citizens of the Czech Republic were paying the price for our failure. Heydrich would recover; he would tighten his already suffocating grip on the Czech population, and things would go back to the way they had been before.
If only I hadn't fucked up...!!

"Don't beat yourself up about it." Adolf Opálka, sitting across from me, eyes me with concern. "We were all involved in this. We're all in this together. You didn't ask for your Sten to jam, did you? You didn't. So, it's not your fault. We all tried our best—"
"Tried our best—?!" I leap to my feet as best as I can in the cramped space we all occupy, my hands clenching into fists. "Innocent people are dying, Opálka, and you have the gall to say we tried our best?!"
"Calm down!" Jan quickly interposes himself between Adolf and I, as if he's afraid I'm going to fly at him. As if I even have the emotional capacity to do so anymore. I nudge him to one side and sink to my knees, slumping against the cold stone floor.
Adolf doesn't say anything, but I can feel his concerned gaze trained on me even as Jan sits back down.
On impulse, I reach into my pocket and pull out three small photos—the only three that go with me wherever I go. One is of my family—my mother holding my sister, me, and my father, all standing in the sand on one of the beaches of Prague. It was taken a year before my father died, when my sister was two. Back when we were a happy, carefree family, before death cast its long shadow over us and stole our father.
The next photo was of Libena. I had taken it the day we attacked Heydrich in the Prague-Liben district. She was sitting on a wooden bench, one leg crossed over another, her hands folded in her lap, smiling demurely at the camera. Our relationship had progressed quickly, but in a good way. We both knew that we wanted to get married after the war—if we survived to see liberation day.
The last photo was of me and Sophie. It had been taken on her first day of school. We had our arms around each other, grinning ear to ear at the camera. My mother always told me that we had the same smile.
I couldn't help but smile bittersweetly as I remembered her shrill, high pitched voice incessantly shrieking in my ear, Josef, pick me up; Josef, I want to buy ribbons for my hair.

She treated me like the father she never knew, and I gladly fulfilled that role. I had made sure she came home before dark, made sure she made friends with the right people, and kept most of not all of the boys who wanted to date her away from her. She hadn't liked that last part as she got older, but I always felt it was for her own good. The last thing I wanted was for her to get taken advantage of. And for a while, I was sure she wouldn't.
That is, until Reinhard Heydrich came into our lives.
I blamed myself for everything that was happening to my sister back home the moment I had received the news from my mother. By allowing Heydrich to do what he did to her, and by not being there to protect her, I had failed her not only as her older brother but as her surrogate father.
If only I had kept her away from Heydrich by taking her to London with me when I went for SOE training, maybe—maybe—
I raise my head. To my surprise, I am all alone in the crypt. My comrades must have all gone while I was lost in my thoughts to stretch their legs in the prayer loft.
I haphazardly stash the photos back in my breast pocket and heave myself to my feet. My footsteps, heavy with lethargy, echo all along the walls as I make my way to where my comrades are standing. To my surprise, they are huddled close together, peering over each others' shoulders excitedly. They speak in hushed tones, but I can sense the obvious joy in what they're saying.
Jan Kubis looks up as I get closer. He breaks away from the circle of comrades and rushes toward me with a newspaper. He literally stashes it in my face out of excitement.
"Read it!"he says excitedly to me. "Read it!"
I peer at the headline, and time seems to stop. My heart freezes in my chest as I grasp the contents of the paper.
Reinhard Heydrich Is Dead.
He's dead. The man who raped my sister and violated our family honor is finally dead.
I don't react the way my comrades expect me to. I don't cheer, or whoop, or turn a cartwheel.
I start to cry.
I don't know whether it's out of relief or joy. Perhaps both.