Stalin Ate My Homework (14 page)

I don’t know what we
thought would happen on this trip but Ladislav, Prukha and presumably the
Communist Party authorities at the highest level had decided that what the
first delegation of British railwaymen to Czechoslovakia would like to see more
than anything else were sights, locations and exhibits connected with the
wartime assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague. The next
morning the fleet of Tatras was waiting for us outside our hotel, and after we
had climbed aboard it proceeded in a long line to the quiet suburb of Kobylisy
There the cars parked and we clambered out, looking around us and not knowing
what to expect. We found that we were standing on a bend in a wide road, across
from us there was a tram track that curved around and out of sight, and in the
centre of the road was a tram stop with a little wooden shelter. Beyond the
shelter there was a long brick wall behind which tall, green-leaved trees
nodded and rustled in the breeze.

Before
leaving the hotel we had been introduced to our new translator, a pretty blonde
woman in her twenties named Nadia. Now that we were an official delegation
Ladislav couldn’t be with us all the time because he had to attend to his other
duties as a senior ministry translator, but he assured Joe that he would join
us as often as possible and in the meantime Nadia would look after our party So
there we were, standing at the side of the road in a tranquil suburb, when our
pretty little translator began her tale of awful murder and terrible
retribution.

Pointing
to the bend where the tram track disappeared, she told us that on 27 May 1942
at 10.30 a.m. Heydrich, the Nazi Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, set
off on his daily journey in an open-topped Mercedes from his home to Prague
Castle. Heydrich was such a monster that even other leading Nazis like Himmler
were afraid of him, and Hitler admired his cruelty to such an extent that he
was considering Heydrich as a possible successor. Two Czechs, Gabcik and Kubis,
who had been trained and flown in from Britain, were waiting at the very tram
stop we were staring at. As Heydrich’s car approached, Gabcik stepped in front
of the vehicle and tried to open fire, but his Sten gun jammed.

I
thought of speaking up at this point, since I was pretty certain that I knew
what had caused this particular problem. My parents’ hope that I would grow up
to be this kind, sensitive pacifist, possibly one who wore sandals over grey
socks, backfired badly Due to the ownership limits they’d placed on pretend
guns, I’d developed an obsession with real firearms, military aircraft and
armoured fighting vehicles of all kinds. If there was a war film on the TV I
was more fascinated by the weapons than by the plot or storyline. There was a
Graham Greene-scripted film that had recently been shown on TV called
Went
the Day Well?,
in which at one point a British sailor opens up on the Nazi
paratroopers trying to take over his village. His weapon is a .45 calibre
Thompson equipped with the fifty-round drum magazine that I was particularly fond
of. And when sometimes there was an exploded drawing of the internal workings
of a rifle or machine gun in one of my comics I devoured every detail, noting
the differences in ammunition, feed mechanism and recoil characteristics. This
was how I knew that, though it was a serviceable and inexpensive sub-machine
gun, there was a drawback with the magazine of the Sten in that it had two
columns of 9mm cartridges arranged side-by-side in an alternating pattern,
merging at the top to form a single column. As a consequence, any dirt in this
taper area was liable to cause feed malfunctions. Rough handling could also
result in deformation of the magazine lips, which required a precise
eight-degree angle to operate. But I decided not to interrupt the story at such
a tense moment by sharing this information with my fellow delegates.

The
other Czech commando, Kubis, threw a modified antitank grenade at the vehicle
and its fragments ripped through the car, embedding shrapnel and fibres from
the upholstery in Heydrich’s body The assassins were initially convinced that
the attack had failed, but Heydrich died eight days later from blood poisoning
caused either by shrapnel from the bomb or by fragments of upholstery which had
entered his spleen.

Next,
feeling slightly sick, we got back into our fleet of black limousines and moved
to the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in the centre of Prague. This was
where Heydrich’s killers had been trapped and put to death after they were
betrayed by a fellow partisan. As our guide talked I looked around and saw that
the inside of the church was still riddled with bullet holes from the
firefight. She told us that the Nazi retribution for the killing of Heydrich
was savage. Ultimately more than thirteen thousand people were arrested,
including Kubis’s girlfriend who died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. In
an attempt to minimise the reprisals among his flock, the bishop to whose
diocese the church belonged took the blame for the actions in the church on
himself, even writing letters to the Nazi authorities. He was arrested and
tortured. On 4 September 1942 he, the church priests and senior lay leaders
were executed by firing squad. Then we had lunch, and afterwards went to a
museum to look at Heydrich’s damaged car.

Towards
the weekend, again in our fleet of government limousines, we went to the
village of Lidice. As a punishment for the assassination of Heydrich, the
Nazis, who suspected there may have been a connection between the perpetrators
and a family who lived in Lidice, killed all the men of this village and
deported the women and children to concentration camps. The buildings were
burned to the ground and the stream that ran through it was diverted to another
course. Grain was then planted over the site of the village in an attempt to
eradicate any sign that the place had ever existed. What we were being shown
here was the oddest thing, an absence, not something that was there but
something that had been taken away All the way back from Lidice in the lead car
I sang ‘One Man Went to Mow’ at the top of my voice, while everybody else sat
in hollow-eyed silence. Our holidays had never been conventional, but this one
was in another league of strangeness. In the second week, between the visits to
locomotive works and folk concerts we were given a private screening at the
Ministry of Information of the 1943 film
Hangmen Also Die!,
a dramatic
re-enactment of the events leading up to the assassination of Heydrich and the
shoot-out in the church of Saints Cyril and Methodius; made in Hollywood by
refugees from the Nazis, it was directed by Fritz Lang, scripted by Bertolt
Brecht amongst others with music by Hans Eisler.

I don’t
know what the Czechs were trying to show us, if anything. In Britain there were
many memorials to the Second World War, big stone things, unmoving and civic
and dedicated almost entirely to the armed forces. My parents never paid any
of them the slightest bit of attention, but as soon as we were on the continent
their attitude changed. They would be constantly pointing out the plaques and
the bundles of wilted flowers tied with red, white and blue ribbons that
commemorated the spots where hostages had been executed for acts of resistance,
and endlessly drawing my attention to the walls of the many buildings which
bore a tracery of craters — the trail of machine gun and rifle fire. ‘Look!’ my
parents would gleefully say, pointing at some inscription, ‘It says here, Lexi,
that twenty hostage nuns were massacred on this very spot,’ or ‘Over there,
Lexi, that was where they hanged the entire football team.’

Lacking
religion as we did, perhaps these were our places of worship. Communists
believed in partisans in the same way that more ethereally inclined families
believed in fairies; they were both mythical woodland creatures possessed of
wisdom and nobility who ran around the forest making mischief. The spiritual
families would seek out spooky caves or magical trees or the places where
miracles happened, and for Communists the sights of Nazi reprisals were our Wooky
Hollow.

Though
it never seemed to be of concern to my parents, mention of the war sometimes
caused in me a scintilla of unease because of the fact that my father had not
fought. Railway guard had been what was known as a ‘reserved occupation’, a job
considered so necessary to the war effort that even if he had wanted to
volunteer Joe would not have been allowed to join up. Still, it bothered me
just a tiny bit, even though Joe’s was actually an extremely dangerous job
because freight trains and marshalling yards were often the target of German
bombers. Most of the others boys’ fathers had been in the army, navy or air
force but mine hadn’t — and he hadn’t volunteered to fight in Spain either.
There was something in me that would have liked him to have been some kind of
soldier or military hero, something spikier than just being a very nice man.

On
another evening we went as a party to a performance at the Magic Lantern
Theatre. The rest of the group were seeing it for the first time and were
astounded by the show, but I was surprised to find myself a little bored by it
all. I supposed there was a limit to how many times you could be impressed by
teapots flying through the air.

As a bit of light relief
from visits to locomotive factories and the horrors of the Second World War,
one evening we were taken to the Good Soldier Schweik pub in the old town of
Prague — the first pub I had ever been in. When I got back to Britain my
parents bought me a Penguin edition of
The Good Soldier Schweik,
a hefty
paperback with a grey cover. I do think they often forgot I was only eight
years old. I didn’t read the book for many years but I liked looking at the
illustrations at the head of each chapter — a tubby, unshaven man in a shabby
uniform, cavorting with dancing girls or mysteriously stuffing dogs down his
tunic. When I did finally get around to reading the book, at twelve or
thirteen, my holiday souvenir turned out to contain a message that seemed very
much at odds with the socialistic seriousness we were usually presented with.
It was as if a stick of Blackpool rock you had bought as a memento of a day out
contained an offensive message running right through the middle of it.

The
Schweik pub was ‘themed’ around the Good Soldier. There were beer mats with his
face on, pictures of the author, Jaroslav Hasek, and there was even a shop
where my parents bought me a little cloth figure of the tubby soldier. When I
read the book I wondered if the Czech authorities knew what they were doing
promoting with Schweik, letting a pub be opened in his name and selling cuddly
toys in his likeness, since the message of the book, while it might have been
anti-authoritarian, is certainly not one supportive of the ideals of socialist
conformity The worrying notion niggled away for years at the back of my mind
that the governments of Communist states might not always know what they were
doing.

The
Good Soldier Schweik
is set at the time of the
First World War and tells the story of a petty thief who makes his living
stealing dogs. Schweik seems determined to volunteer to fight for the Austrian
Emperor, but nobody is sure whether he is an idiot or an incredibly crafty
anarchist intent on undermining the war effort. Though I was fascinated by the
book, I sometimes found the character of Schweik unsettling. I was still enough
of an ideologue to find his total rejection of doctrine, his selfishness, his
lustfulness and his dishonesty disturbing, but also worryingly appealing. The
figure I found more congenial, as well as a wonderful comic creation, was
Volunteer Marek. In civilian life Marek had been a writer, one who got fired
from his job at a natural history magazine after writing articles about
imaginary animals because he couldn’t be bothered learning about real ones and
found them too dull anyway. Marek is appointed to the post of historian for
Schweik’s battalion and in that role he begins writing, in advance,
descriptions of heroic and poignant deaths for his fellow soldiers.

I
supposed that Czech officialdom assumed that the book only mocked the
authorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire because that was when it was set,
whereas in fact it was a satire on the corruption and stupidity of all
officialdom. In retrospect maybe
The Good Soldier Schweik
also opened a
window into the sly and sardonic nature of the people who had been our hosts
and went some way to explaining a few of the odd confusing things that had gone
on.

After two weeks’ holiday
culminating in one final huge dinner, with speeches and the presentation of
much globular Bohemian glassware, we set out on the return journey to Britain,
with Nadia our translator travelling with us as far as the border. It was night
and we were approaching West Germany when, realising that I hadn’t seen Alf for
some time, I went looking for him. I searched all over the train until finally
I came to a compartment with the blinds drawn. Sliding open the door, I saw in
the darkness the shape of two figures springing apart, Nadia and Alf, their
clothes in disarray ‘It’s dark in here,’ I said, switching on the reading
lights. In the sudden brightness Nadia looked like she had been crying. This
didn’t stop me sitting down next to them and beginning to chat happily about
whatever was on my mind. Oddly, they didn’t seem to want me around. I couldn’t
understand it: people, particularly Alf, usually acted as if they found my
company delightful, but these two definitely wanted me gone. So after a while I
got up and left and spent the next few years wondering what had been going on.