Czech Heroes Search

From the BBC:

"Czechs search for dead 'heroes' who killed SS chief Heydrich"

The assassination of Nazi police chief Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak resistance fighters in 1942 was one of the outstanding feats of daring in World War Two.  A new thriller called Anthropoid premieres in the US on 12 August, dramatising the ambush by British-trained Czechoslovak paratroopers Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis in Prague. Yet even today parts of the story are shrouded in mystery. SS Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich, acting Reichsprotektor of occupied Bohemia and Moravia, was a key organiser of the Holocaust.  The Nazi retaliation for his assassination was savage - the Czech villages of Lidice and Lezaky were razed, the inhabitants shot or deported to concentration camps.   Houses in the district where I now live are dotted with plaques to those who helped shelter the parachutists and who paid the ultimate price. The SS military hospital on the river, where Kubis was brought, badly wounded, is now the maternity hospital where both of my children were born. Kubis was dragged there from the church crypt where seven Czechoslovaks had held off 800 SS and Gestapo troops. He never regained consciousness.  Gabcik took his own life. The parachutists were laid out in front of the church to be identified by the man who had betrayed them, fellow paratrooper Karel Curda.   But the answer to one question had long eluded me.  Where are they buried?   Surprisingly, the truth has begun to emerge only in the past decade. "Under these trees are mass graves of people from the Second World War. You can even see where they are - look - the earth has been compressed a little," said Jiri Linek, from the Organisation of Former Political Prisoners. We had walked down a path to a small clearing in Dablice cemetery, on the northern fringes of Prague. I had driven past it, unwittingly, for years.  "Here," said Jiri, pointing at a patch of grass, the rectangular outlines of a slight depression faintly visible.  "Or maybe here. This is where they should be."  Historians and researchers agree the mass graves of this local cemetery are the final resting place not just for Gabcik and Kubis, but their five fellow parachutists, the dozens of citizens who sheltered them, and the hundreds shot in reprisal for Heydrich's death. But while every Czech schoolchild has heard of Gabcik and Kubis, hardly anyone realises they are buried here. "People simply don't know. It was hidden for 42 years," Mr Linek told the BBC. "If the Communist regime hadn't started in 1948, we would know exactly where Gabcik, Kubis and the others were. But because they flew from England, a capitalist state and our enemy, they weren't regarded as the heroes they should have been."  The location has been established almost single-handedly by author Jaroslav Cvancara. He was fascinated by the Operation Anthropoid story from childhood.  In the 1980s he began travelling the country, tracking down the parachutists' relatives, borrowing their memories and photographs. 

^ This is an important part of World War II. Not only did the Czech Resistance kill one of the top Nazis, but the Nazi response (destroying Lidice and Lezaky) but also naming the major action of deporting and murdering the Jews being held in ghettos for the killed Nazi (Operation Reinhard.) I have seen the movie "Operation Daybreak" and liked it. I am interested to also see the new movie "Anthropoid." ^

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36944090