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SS General Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942)
was one of the main ‘architects’ of the Holocaust and in 1942 he was the acting
Governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the area now known as the
Czech Republic. In January 1942, he was Chairman of the Wannsee Conference at
which the terrible fate of the Jewish people was decided. On the 27th
of May 1942, Heydrich was shot at while driving through Prague. During this
attack, a hand grenade, thrown into his open top vehicle, exploded. Heydrich
was rushed to hospital but died of his wounds or sepsis resulting from them early
in the morning of the 4th of June. His senior, the Chancellor of
Germany, the dictator Adolf Hitler, was furious.
The assassination attack was
carried out by Czechoslovak men who had been trained in England and then
parachuted into Czechoslovakia. The men were volunteers, who were members of
the Free Czechoslovak Forces stationed in the Warwickshire town of Royal
Leamington Spa, where there was a training camp for them. It had been there
since 1940. Seven of the Czechoslovak men flew from England in December 1941 and
parachuted at various paces over their native land. Two of them, Jozef Gabčík (1912-1942)
and Jan Kubiš (1913-1942), carried out the attack in Prague that led to the
ending of Heydrich’s life. These two men and the others dropped over
Czechoslovakia sacrificed their lives in the struggle to free their country
from Nazi tyranny.
In November 2021, we paid a brief
visit to Leamington Spa. Amongst its attractions is the pleasant Jephson
Gardens, which are close to the spa establishments after which the town gets
its name. The Park is named after the physician and philanthropist Henry Jephson
(1798-1878), who promoted the superior healing powers of the town’s spring
water. An attractive circular neo-classical temple containing a statue of
Jephson was erected in his honour in 1849. This stands atop a small mound. Close
to it there is another monument, also circular.
The other monument was unveiled in
1968, 50 years after the formation of Czechoslovakia out of the ruins of the
failed Austro-Hungarian Empire. The memorial is in the form of a circular fountain.
A bowl is supported by a single pillar on which the heraldic emblem of
Czechoslovakia can be seen in bas-relief. Something, which at first sight
resembles a large mushroom, sprouts upwards from the centre of the bowl. Closer
examination of this reveals that it is a sculpture depicting a cluster of open
parachutes. On each parachute, there is a name of one of the group of
volunteers who parachuted into Czechoslovakia. The monument was designed by
John French.
According to a noticeboard close to
the Czechoslovak volunteers’ memorial, this small fountain also remembers the thousands
of Czechoslovak citizens, who were murdered by the Nazis in reprisal for
Heydrich’s death. After numerous arrests were made, two Czech villages suspected
of having been involved in the assassination plot, Lidice and Ležáky were
literally wiped off the face of the earth by the Nazis. Their innocent
inhabitants were mostly killed, but some were sent to concentration camps.
These poor people are remembered in Jephson Park, which is such a lovely place
that one would not think that it could possibly be even remotely associated with
the human tragedies that followed the death of a monstrous member of the Nazi
party.
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