Beauty and the Beast

Part Four: Double-Crossed

Cease searching for the assassins of Heydrich; cease arresting and executing innocent people. I can't stand it anymore. The perpetrators of the assassination are a certain Gabcik from Slovakia and Jan Kubis, whose brother is an innkeeper from Moravia.

He sits all alone in the rearmost compartment of one of many trains bound for Prague, his temple resting against the glass. The heat from his skin leaves behind a halo of steam when he lifts his head to lean it back against the cracked leather upholstery of the seat.
He had been on the train many, many times, but for reasons none so momentous as this one. He was going to put an end to the bloodbath for which Heydrich's assassination had been the catalyst.
He should have done it a long time ago. He should have put an end to Benes' senseless plot before it even had a chance to be exacted. Maybe if he had, many Czechs who were now dead would still be alive. The now nonexistent village of Lidice would still exist.
It doesn't matter anymore. Whatever happened, happened. There is nothing he can do that will bring Lidice back.
All he can think of now is his mother and sister, all alone on their farm. The village in which they reside is a small one, much smaller than Lidice. How can he be so sure that the Germans won't earmark it for eradication next? What could possibly give him closure that he won't come home one day and find that "home" no longer exists and has been razed to the ground? That his mother and sister are newly minted inmates of the infamous Ravensbrück concentration camp, condemned to die a slow death of either overwork or starvation, or both?

Benes doesn't understand. He never did. He doesn't know what it's like to live in the Protectorate under Nazi rule. He doesn't know the murderous, bloodthirsty nature of the people he's urging the Czechs to rise up against. By setting this so-called "Operation Anthropoid" in motion, the president in exile had essentially daubed the blood of thousands of Czechs on his hands by condemning them to death in absentia.

That was mainly what had prompted him to go turncoat—his deep disillusionment with the exiled government. They were completely out of touch with the people suffering under the rule of the Germans. From behind their polished mahogany desks, they could easily give order after order after order and plan operation after operation after operation, and sit there twiddling their thumbs, waiting for results—ill gotten results at an alarmingly high price.
To Benes and his colleagues, civilian casualties were just a number, another cost for "freedom." Easy for them to say—they weren't the ones losing mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends on a daily basis.

If the Germans continued to use this bloody method to search for Heydrich, they would eventually wipe out the entire Czech population, and take his family with.
They would kill his mother.
They would kill his sister.
And they would kill him.
He didn't care if he died; being in the army taught him to regard death with cavalier nonchalance. It was the horror of seeing his mother's body riddled with bullets, lying in a bloody heap in the grass that scared him. It was the helplessness he would feel as the Germans raped his sister before his eyes and emptied a pistol into her head after they were finished with her that enraged him.

He could not let them die.
Not like that.
He was his mother's son, the only one who had stayed with her to help her in her old age—he and his sister. He wasn't about to be the reason the last emotion she felt before she died was fear. He didn't want to be the reason his sister died a dishonored woman.

That desire to protect his family and those he held dear was what had driven him to write that letter. He had cried as he wrote it, not out of sadness or anger but out of frustration. He didn't want to betray his comrades, he really didn't. But family came first at all times, didn't it? Besides, the Allies didn't stand a chance against Hitler and his Wehrmacht. The Nazis would win the war and handsomely reward those who assisted the regime, more so after the war was won. By continuing to assist a lost cause, he was only making his post-war situation and that of his family worse, as they were sure to face the repercussions of their rebelliousness after the war.
There was no point in rebelling against a government that was clearly going to emerge victorious from this conflict.