However, the war found them eventually. In late May 1942, a few weeks after Ella had been deported, Czech commandos assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the highest-ranking Nazi in the Protectorate, who was the Reich Main Security Officer and Deputy Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia. He bore various soubriquets, including the man with the iron heart, the hangman, and the butcher of Prague, and had been chosen by Hitler and Himmler to control the Czechs through fear. He had three public aims: to “Germanize” the Czechs, to wipe out any resistance, and to implement the “Final Solution,” settled in December 1941.
Heydrich had shown every sign of delivering his objectives. Five days after his arrival in the autumn of the previous year, he had ordered the closing of all synagogues in the Protectorate. Two weeks later he had started the deportations, personally ordering the first “evacuation” of five thousand Czech Jews to a camp in Lody. By November 1941, he had coerced the Jewish leaders in the Council to begin the deportations to Terezín. The onset of Heydrich’s regime marked the beginning of a markedly brutal campaign against not only the Jews but anyone who refused to cooperate. Thousands of dissidents were arrested, put to death, or sent to the camps.
The Nazis were particularly effective in their campaign to dehumanize Jews, fragment society, and crush resistance in Czechoslovakia, more so than in other occupied regions. Yet a small team of Czechoslovak army parachutists, marshaled by the resistance in exile in London, had set out to assassinate Heydrich in an operation code-named Anthropoid. Their effort to ambush his open-top car as it was driven from his home in the suburbs to his office at Prague Castle was not instantly successful due to a faulty machine gun. However, showing remarkable bravery, they managed to injure Heydrich with a hand grenade. Heydrich was taken to a hospital and eventually died from infection to his wounds on June 4, 1942.
The viciousness of the Nazi response was staggering. They were determined to find the perpetrators, to punish anyone who had helped them, and to terrify the rest of the Czechs into complete submission. Five days after Heydrich’s death, the village of Lidice, the occupants of which had been falsely accused of harboring the parachutists, was entirely destroyed. Every man over fifteen was shot, and women and children were sent to the camps. To emphasize the finality of these actions, the buildings were razed to the ground.
Two weeks later, a radio transmitter was found in another village, Ležáky. The entire adult population was shot, the children deported, and the village destroyed. According to official numbers, 1,331 people were executed in the Protectorate between late May and early July. At that point, General Daluege, who had assumed Heydrich’s post, issued an order stating that anyone found promulgating, or even failing to report, hostility to the Reich would face the death penalty. Helping Jews in any way was deemed worthy of similar treatment.
Posters to this effect were plastered all over Prague. Daily announcements blared out of radios and public loudspeakers. A reward of ten million crowns was offered for information leading to the arrest of the assassins. This inducement was accompanied by stark warnings that execution awaited not only those who withheld such information but also their families.
The Nazi reaction to the assassination decimated any effective underground resistance movement in the Protectorate. This frightful period was termed by the Czechs Heydrichiáda. The Gestapo and the SS literally tore the capital apart in search of the perpetrators and those who had helped them. It was the largest manhunt of the war, with 36,000 homes raided and more than 13,000 civilians arrested. By mid-June, the pursuit was concentrated in the New Town area of Prague, as it was suspected that the parachutists were being hidden in the neighborhood. Trojanova 16 sat at the heart of the search zone.
The streets swarmed with troops. Search parties erupted into hundreds of homes around Lotar and Zdenka. The suffocating atmosphere left an already anxious Lotar paralyzed with fear. Ella had been deported only a few weeks before, and they had still received no news of her. While his marriage to Zdenka provided some theoretical legal protection from being transported, Lotar, just like Hans, lived in constant and legitimate fear. The Nazis were outraged by the insubordination of the Czechs, and they needed no legal excuse to shoot or imprison a Jew. Lotar was also acutely conscious that he was still using his fake identification in the name of his friend Ivan Rubeš. If his apartment was searched and he was found to be holding false papers, he would certainly be killed.
Zdenka recalled that one night Lotar and she awoke to the din of shouts from the Gestapo in the streets. The stomping in hallways, banging of doors, and barked orders seemed closer than ever. The police had entered their building.
Terrified, Lotar dragged Zdenka into the bathroom, where he kept a small leather case holding his glass vials of cyanide. They sat in darkness, trying to remain absolutely silent, but Zdenka could tell Lotar was crying. She comforted him quietly and murmured over and over that they should not give up. They were on the fourth floor, and the noises were rattling up from the floors below. It was impossible to tell from which floor precisely, but they sounded close.
“I am not giving up yet. I am not biting one of these. If you want to do it, go ahead, but you are on your own,” she said defiantly.
Zdenka managed to prise the case away from Lotar and convinced him to wait a moment more, until the soldiers were at their own door. The shouting and crashing reverberated around them, echoing through the old building as the two of them huddled alone in the lightless bathroom. Then, as suddenly as it had burst upon them, the storm moved on. The Gestapo had obtained information that the perpetrators were being hidden in the Ss. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral, just yards away, and redirected their forces accordingly.
On June 18, seven hundred Waffen-SS troops bore down on the handful of parachutists who had been hidden in the church. Any hope of escape disappeared when the Nazis resorted to flooding the crypt where they had been driven to make their last stand. As ammunition supplies dwindled and the water rose around them, the parachutists determined never to surrender. Some shot themselves; others bit into their cyanide vials. The tragedy drew to a close and, once more saved by Zdenka’s fortitude, Lotar carefully stowed his own poison.
As daily life became ever more difficult, Lotar, Hans, and Otto continued trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. And yet the boys still took some calculated risks. Despite Otto’s ire toward him, and many promises to the contrary, Hans continued to be late for curfews and spend time behaving foolishly with Míla and Zdeněk. Lotar was much more cautious than Hans, but he too was inclined to push his luck. He accepted an invitation from a theatrical friend, Erik Kolár, to help teach in a clandestine school. He revealed these visits only to Zdenka, not wishing to worry his father. The school was on the second floor of a building on Spálená Street, a few minutes’ walk from where they lived.
Erik and Lotar taught theater and poetry to a handful of Jewish children who had yet to be deported. They worked hard to provide their charges with a semblance of normal life and moments of escape from the increasingly grim reality outside the walls of their little makeshift classroom. They even staged a performance of Karel Jaromír Erben’s fairy tale The Three Golden Hairs of the Wise Old Man, complete with costumes, an act of quiet rebellion that must have provided a momentary distraction.