Jan Kubiš was a Moravian from Dolní Vilémovice — a scout, then a brickworks labourer, then a platoon sergeant manning the border fortifications in 1938 that his country was ordered to abandon without firing a shot. He left in June 1939, fought with the Foreign Legion and in France, earned a Croix de Guerre, and reached England with the Czechoslovak brigade.
When Czechoslovak intelligence in London went looking for volunteers for an operation against the head of the Nazi security apparatus in Prague, he and Jozef Gabčík — a Czech and a Slovak, close friends since France — put their names forward together. They were dropped on the night of 28 December 1941 and lived underground for five months on the courage of Prague families.
At the bend in Libeň on 27 May 1942, when Gabčík's Sten gun jammed and the operation hung in the air for two seconds, Kubiš pulled out the modified anti-tank grenade and threw it. It fell short and burst against the car's rear wing. Fragments of the upholstery and the car's own horsehair were driven into Heydrich's spleen; he fired his pistol after the men, walked a few steps, and collapsed. Kubiš, his own face bleeding from splinters, rode off on a bicycle through the trams.
Heydrich died of septicaemia a week later — the only senior Nazi of his rank killed by the resistance anywhere in occupied Europe. The revenge fell on Lidice, on Ležáky and on thousands of others, and the two men have been argued about ever since, in Prague more than anywhere.
On 18 June, betrayed, Kubiš was one of three men fighting in the nave of the church in Resslova Street while four others held the crypt below. He was wounded and unconscious when the SS reached him and died on the way out. He was twenty-eight. Both he and Gabčík were made Heroes of the Czech Republic — in 2002, sixty years late.
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