Ever heard of Reinhard Heydrich?
More perhaps than any other single Nazi other than Adolf Hitler himself , Reinhard Heydrich was responsible for the Holocaust since in January 1942 he chaired the infamous Wannsee Conference that planned the so-called Final Solution. On 27 May 1942, Heinrich was the subject of an assassination attempt in Prague and, on 4 June 1942, he died of his injuries. The Nazi retribution was unbelievably savage and included the entire destruction of the village of Lidice.
The assassination of Heydrich has fascinated me for some 30 years. I first became interested in the event when researching the biography of my wife’s father Karel Kuttelwascher which was published as “Night Hawk” (now you know the reason for the name of this blog). I devoted a couple of paragraphs of my book to the main facts on the incident and its aftermath.
About the same time, I befriended a Czech (Pavel Horvath) who – it turned out – lived in a street in Prague at the end of which is the church where the resistance fighters who killed Heyrich took refuge and were subsequently killed. The cellar where they met their death is now a museum which I have visited several times. Also I visited modern day Lidice with Pavel shortly before his premature death.
Why do I mention today the assassination of Heydrich? Well, today I started to read a new novel about the event. It has the odd title “HHhH” and an odd structure in which the author interlaces discussion of the challenge of writing about historic events in fictional form. The nearest experience I have previously had to such a history in fictional form is “Schindler’s Ark”, the novel by Thomas Keneally (which was filmed as “Schindler’s List”).