Jozef Gabčík was a blacksmith and farrier from a village near Žilina who was working at an army depot when the Czechoslovak state was dismembered in 1939. He sabotaged the stores rather than hand them to the Wehrmacht, got out through Poland, fought with the Foreign Legion and then in France, and ended up in Britain with the exiled Czechoslovak brigade — where the intelligence service was looking for men willing to take on a job with no plan for getting home.
The target was Reinhard Heydrich: head of the Reich Security Main Office, chairman of the Wannsee Conference, acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and the man the Czechs called the Butcher of Prague. Gabčík and his friend Jan Kubiš parachuted in on the night of 28 December 1941, landing in the wrong place, and spent five months moving between safe houses provided by families who knew exactly what the penalty would be.
On the morning of 27 May 1942 they waited at a hairpin bend in the Prague suburb of Libeň, where Heydrich's open Mercedes would have to slow almost to walking pace. Gabčík stepped into the road, raised his Sten gun a metre from the car — and it jammed. Heydrich, instead of ordering his driver on, stood up to shoot back, and in that pause Kubiš threw a converted anti-tank grenade against the car's rear wheel.
Heydrich died of sepsis on 4 June. The reprisals were monstrous: Lidice and Ležáky erased, the men shot, the women sent to Ravensbrück, the children with them or gassed, and some five thousand people killed in all. It remains the most argued-over act of resistance of the war, and no one who argues it can say the two men did not know what they were starting.
Betrayed by a fellow parachutist, seven of them were cornered in the crypt of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius on 18 June 1942. They held off some seven hundred SS and police for six hours, and when the fire brigade began flooding the crypt they used their last rounds on themselves. Gabčík was thirty. The bullet holes around the crypt window in Resslova Street have been left exactly as they were.
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