— BISHOP GORAZD OF PRAGUE —
‘A nation of Gorazds’
In October 1938, Adolf Hitler invaded the Czechoslovakian territory of the Sudetenland. While the liver-shaped strip of land between Prague and Dresden had been awarded to the newly formed nation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the Great War, the vast majority of the population spoke, and considered themselves to be, German. Ethnonationalist tensions had been a feature of life there since the mid-nineteenth century as the bizarre combination of imagined folkloric identity, scientific racism and old-fashioned hatred of ‘the other’ began to trickle down from the intellectual elite to the general public. By the mid-1930s, the trickle had become a flood, and, enthused by the idea of being integrated into a greater Reich, many of the Sudeten Germans welcomed Hitler’s invasion, not caring that it was carried out in direct contradiction of the treaties that had bound Germany since 1919 and of international law. While it may not be a surprise that the politically sympathetic population of the Sudetenland allowed a flagrant act of aggression by a militarising Fascist power, it was more of a shock that the nations which were supposed to enforce international conventions against such a thing occurring – namely Britain and France – allowed it as well.
The Munich Agreement, where Hitler had persuaded the Anglo-French alliance not to intervene by claiming that there would be no further territorial demands made on neighbouring countries by Nazi Germany, had been signed on 30th September and gave the Nazis free rein to occupy Czech territory. Famously, on his return, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper in the air as he stood on the tarmac at the Heston Aerodrome (now an industrial estate marooned by the M4 motorway) and declared, ‘I believe it is peace for our time’, a belief that was to be shattered in a matter of months. Less well known is Chamberlain’s radio broadcast prior to departing for Munich. In it he referred to Czechoslovakia as ‘a far-off country … of whom we know nothing’. Perhaps, given that such sentiments were so freely expressed before the conference, the Czechs do not call Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler ‘the Munich Agreement’ but, rather, ‘Mnichovská zrada’ – ‘the Munich Betrayal’.
So it was that the Czechs became the first nation to know what it was to live under the Nazi yoke, often acting as the place where Nazi policies were ‘tested’ prior to being unleashed elsewhere. The residents of Bohemia and Moravia had long prided themselves on their history of resistance to centralised control – from nurturing Jan Hus to sheltering a fugitive Giacomo Casanova; the sense of a bohemian being someone uninterested in convention didn’t spring out of thin air. Theirs might have been a country about which Neville Chamberlain ‘knew nothing’, but the Czechs were to become well known in Berlin for the dogged refusal of vast swathes of their population to roll over to Nazi diktat. A wander around Prague (or most other Czech cities and towns) reveals the cost of this resistance – round most corners you will be sure to find a plaque affixed to a wall or road sign that reads ‘Here fell X in the battle for the country’.
Bishop Gorazd did not wake up one morning in late spring 1942 intending to be one of those heroes. People rarely wake up expecting to perform acts of heroism, least of all bookish clergymen trying to keep a crumbling cathedral in Prague going. The centre of Gorazd’s operations was no mastodonic monument to ecclesiastical power but a modest Baroque church dedicated to Sts Cyril and Methodius, tucked down a side street just off Prague’s New Town Square. It was from the church, since its purchase and conversion from its previous role as a derelict army storehouse in 1933, that Gorazd had run the Orthodox Church in the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia with very little drama. After all, the place was mainly Catholic: unlike other nations claiming Slavic descent, the Czechs and Slovaks had taken the Western side in the Great Schism, and Catholicism became deeply entrenched when Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia came within the orbit of the regime in Vienna, with its close ties to Rome.
With the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, independence had been proclaimed in Prague and a number of religious figures publicly stated it was time to throw off not only Austrian political structures, but religious ones as well. Many elected to form the Czechoslovak Hussite Church (named after Jan Hus, the fifteenth-century would-be reformer executed at the Council of Constance in 1415), but a small number decided to look east to Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia – and Orthodoxy. Among these new converts was a Roman Catholic priest from Moravia called Father Matthias.
He had been born as Matthias Pavlik in Hrubá Vrbka (‘the place of the hardy little willow’) in 1879. Hrubá Vrbka is a tiny village nestled within the White Carpathians, a mountainous region between Moravia and Slovakia mostly famed throughout its history for its high concentration of bandits. Somehow, he escaped his somewhat inauspicious upbringing and ended up studying at the noted Catholic University in Olomouc, where, in the early 1900s, having excelled academically, he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. But at the end of the First World War, the nation began to reject Roman Catholicism as an Austrian import and look for a more ‘authentically Slavic’ religion, and Pavlik sought to jump ecclesiastical ship.
Pavlik’s potential as a leader for the nascent Orthodox community in the new republic was spotted swiftly. In 1921, he was first made Archimandrite of the Hopovo Monastery in Serbia (a sort of senior abbot), and then bishop in the same year. Pavlik took the name Gorazd when he became bishop of the tiny church; it was the name of the successor of St Methodius, the first missionary sent to the region from Constantinople, thus marking him out as the true successor to the first Christians in the region. It was a bold statement for a man whose church numbered, at most, a couple of thousand people spread across several large provinces.
The primary task that the new bishop had was to create a corpus of theology and liturgy in the Czech language, a job to which he was well suited. He produced vast volumes in order to facilitate Orthodox worship in Czech and Slovak and even managed to find time to produce other academic works, notably writing on the life and death of Jan Hus, the man who had first stirred the spirit of Czech religious and national independence some half a millennium earlier. In Gorazd’s work on Hus, he took a cautious view of the man who had, after all, been executed as a heretic, but he did produce a liturgy to mark the day of what the Czech state saw as his martyrdom, as well as writing these reflective lines: ‘We think that it is better to live and toil for a great cause than to die for it. But there is nothing greater than to lay down one’s life for the Gospel of Christ.’ This might have remained a throwaway statement in an obscure academic work forgotten by the centuries were it not for that morning in June 1942 when Gorazd woke up a hero.
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In 1943, British satirist Noël Coward released a song ironically imploring the Allies not to treat the Germans too badly when their defeat inexorably came. Though they hadn’t been the best of neighbours in the world, to the other nations of continental Europe, Coward, with tongue firmly in cheek amid the unfolding horrors of war, was sure that a spirit of ‘forgive and forget’ would prevail once peace came. The BBC felt the humour of the song didn’t translate well for those listening in, so barred it from the radio. The Nazis, however, understood it perfectly, placing Coward on a list of people to be eliminated on the presumed invasion of Britain. When the full list was published after the war, the author Rebecca West sent Coward an outraged letter, saying, ‘My dear! Just think of the people we would have been seen dead with!’
As Coward well knew, to describe the forces of Nazi Germany as being ‘a little naughty’ to the occupied nations, and in particular the Czechs, was a statement of Swiftian grotesqueness. After Munich gave Hitler the Sudetenland in late 1938, the rest of the country was invaded in March 1939 and became ‘the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’. Colleges and universities were closed. Political leaders and members of the intelligentsia were arrested en masse and either executed or sent to concentration camps in Germany itself. The plan for the ‘Germanification’ of these lands began early in 1940. It was to be achieved through both cultural indoctrination and through the deportation and mass murder of those deemed racially impure or impossible to Germanise – some 50 per cent of the population.
In September 1941, Hitler was becoming frustrated with the man he had installed as ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia. Konstantin von Neurath had been appointed to the role in an attempt to pacify international objection to Hitler’s annexation in 1939. He was a career diplomat whom the Führer had fired from his role as head of the Foreign Service in 1938 for expressing doubts about his plans for war. He had attempted to reingratiate himself by instituting anti-Jewish laws and agreeing to the execution of protesting students, but Hitler wanted more. Von Neurath was removed and replaced by the infamous ‘man with no heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, of nose-measuring fame.
Heydrich immediately set to work making sure that the Czechs knew that his fearsome reputation was entirely justified. He was inaugurated at 11 a.m. on 27th September in Prague Castle. By four o’clock that afternoon, Alois Eliáš, the tolerated political leader of the Czech government, had been arrested. By the early hours of 28th September, martial law had been declared across the entire country; by that afternoon, the two leaders of Czech military resistance, Generals Bilý and Vojta, had been summarily executed. By 29th September, he had closed every synagogue in the country and banned non-Jews from consorting with Jews. On 30th September, he declared that, for those arrested under martial law, two sentences were available: summary execution or imprisonment at the concentration camp at Mauthausen. Of the Czechs sent to Mauthausen, only 4 per cent survived. By the start of October, work had begun to construct the Theresienstadt concentration camp and by 24th November the first deportees had arrived there. Heydrich wanted the Czechs, the Führer and the world to know that he would not be showing any mercy to the nation that he referred to as ‘garbage’.
Heydrich was convinced that his iron fist and stone heart would crush all potential resistance. He had declared that ‘one day the entire region will be German’. Such was the assumed efficacy of his brutal methods that he would routinely ride in an open-topped car, enjoying the bracing breeze as he commuted between his neoclassical manor house just outside Prague and the hulking walls of Prague Castle, behind which he signed away the lives of thousands. He took it for granted that no one would dare to harm him, but he was wrong. A month after his inauguration, the wheels had already been set in motion for his assassination.
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In the little church on the other side of the river from Prague Castle, the world of decrees and plots must have seemed very far away. The day-to-day saying of prayers and pastoral care of the little congregation was taken care of by two clergy, Father Václav Čikl and Father Vladimír Petřek, both bright protégés of Bishop Gorazd. They were ably assisted by lay leaders, in particular the sacrist Václav Ornest and the chairman of the synod, Jan Sonnevend, a senior figure in a number of Prague medical organisations.
After the imposition of Nazi rule, Gorazd had been required to put himself under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Archbishop Seraphim of Berlin (also a convert), who, in return for his obedience to the new order, sent him some perfume and incense as a gift. Other than this minor organisational hitch, the Church and Bishop Gorazd might well have continued in wilful ignorance of what was going on around them. However, as with Bishop Gorazd, many of the Church’s members had joined Orthodoxy out of an intense sense of national pride and felt that the crimes being perpetrated against the country and people they loved could not go on without response. One such man was Jan Sonnevend, who, through his links with the Red Cross, had become a commander in the OSVO, a Czech resistance group that had its somewhat unlikely origin in a pre-war organisation of sports clubs.
Jan Sonnevend was not the only Czech to believe that something had to be done. Many miles away, in the picturesque English village of Addington, just south of Buckingham, František Moravec, the Czech government-in-exile’s chief of military intelligence, was putting the finishing touches to an outlandish and risky plan to remind the Third Reich that, far from being inferior, the Czech and Slovak peoples were not to be messed with. He had handpicked nine Czechoslovakian commandos, who, on the evening of 28th December 1942, were parachuted into the occupied territories with the express order to bring about the death of Reinhard Heydrich. Two of the commandos were dropped over the small town of Nehvizdy, to the east of Prague: a baby-faced Czech bricklayer turned soldier called Jan Kubiš and a stocky Slovak former blacksmith named Jozef Gabčík. Over the next few months, they and the other seven men moved between locations, forming plans for their assassination attempt and making contact with existing resistance operatives, including the OSVO.
In mid-April 1942, Jan Sonnevend was approached by Petr Fafek, a colleague at Sonnevend’s ‘League against Tuberculosis’ as well as a fellow OSVO resistance member, who asked whether Sonnevend might be able to hide some potential fugitives in the near future. Having been frustrated by the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church in occupied nations such as the Netherlands and Poland on more than one occasion, the Nazis, directed by the ever-calculating Heydrich, had most churches belonging to the country’s majority religion under close surveillance. The small group of Orthodox believers in their recently restored little church were much less likely to attract notice. Sonnevend agreed in principle and waited until the call came to inform him that the church might be needed.
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On 27th May 1942, Reinhard Heydrich is riding in his open-top car as usual, en route to Prague Castle. As they approach the narrow bend near the Bulovka Hospital, Heydrich’s driver has to negotiate the apparent collision course of various trams (an occupational hazard of driving in Prague, even today). As he does so, another car pulls up alongside them, and the Reichsprotektor comes face-to-face with the assassins Gabčík and Kubiš. Gabčík pulls out a submachine gun, points it directly into Heydrich’s face and pulls the trigger – but the gun jams. Heydrich, rather than making good his escape, stands up in his car and pulls out his own gun to shoot back. Meanwhile, Kubiš emerges and succeeds in detonating an anti-tank grenade in the car, ripping apart the metal, fabric and the occupants. Incredibly, neither Heydrich nor his driver is dead. As Kubiš escapes on a bicycle, the wounded Heydrich bellows at his driver to chase Gabčík. Sprinting after him, the driver catches up with Gabčík at a nearby butcher’s shop, where the commando manages to shoot the bodyguard in the legs and disappear. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that ‘the man with no heart’ is very human after all and quite severely wounded. He is taken to the Bulovka Hospital, but, in keeping with the deluded logic that had caused him to order the measuring of the nose of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, it is said that he refuses immediate medical attention from non-Aryan doctors, preferring to wait for physicians of German descent to be found. So it is, due to the purity of his Fascist beliefs (but more prosaically, due to the sepsis that had set into his flesh when Kubiš had succeeded in blasting bits of metal and leather upholstery into it), on 4th June 1942, that Reinhard Heydrich dies.
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Although the Butcher of Prague took some time to die, the manhunt for those who had attacked him began immediately. When the news that he had been attacked reached Berlin, Hitler was incandescent and ordered ten thousand of the most senior Czech citizens to be summarily executed. It was only when Himmler pointed out that this would involve a serious blow to the industrial capability of the Reich, at the very moment when the war on the Eastern Front was straining its resources, that he relented. That was not to say that the deed would go unpunished, but the rather awkward fact that there were no suspects to hand was an embarrassment to the Nazi high command. Little did they know that, after hiding in a series of safe houses around Prague in the days immediately following the assassination, by the beginning of June, seven of the original nine agents sent over as part of Operation Anthropoid were concealed in the crypt underneath the Orthodox cathedral of Cyril and Methodius down the side street near the New Town Square.
Not only was the presence of the commandos there initially unknown to the Nazis, it was also unknown to Bishop Gorazd. In fairness to Sonnevend, he had tried desperately to find other monasteries or churches in which he could hide the men, but, in the end, faced with no other viable alternative, he had to resort to his own congregation. Fathers Čikl and Petřek readily agreed, despite the enormous risk, as did Ornest. But the question remained: how to tell their bishop? On 11th June, the clergy and laity finally plucked up the courage to tell Gorazd. While initially shocked, Gorazd made the decision that morning that, not only should the Church continue to hide the parachutists, but that he himself would, as shepherd of the flock, take responsibility for them, aware of the huge risk he now ran and the inevitability of death if he was caught.
Although this unlikely cell of resistance fighters was not exactly accomplished in the ways of people smuggling and espionage, even they realised that the first rule of hiding is to keep moving. Therefore, aware that they were being watched by a specially placed spy in the building opposite (who, it would later transpire, had absolutely no awareness of the goings-on behind the church’s Baroque façade), they decided that they would try and move the seven most wanted men in Europe to another monastery on 18th June.
This clerical version of The Great Escape never came to pass. On the early hours of the very day set for the moving of the parachutists, the little church was surrounded by nearly eight hundred SS men, with express orders that the seven men should be captured alive. Of the original nine commandos, one had committed suicide when his cover had been blown in April 1942; the other, Karel Curda, had stayed away from the church, preferring to hide in a safe house and, lured by the promise of one million gold marks to anyone who assisted the Gestapo in finding the assassins, had betrayed his fellow parachutists. Unbeknownst to the men in the crypt, to Sonnevend, or to Bishop Gorazd, the operation had already begun on 17th June as former safe houses were raided and entire families arrested.
An almost day-long gun battle ensued as the Gestapo tried to weed out the seven men. Though hopelessly outnumbered, the commandos put up a valiant fight, with the Germans having to resort to flooding the crypt in order to flush them out. When they did, they found only one man still alive (none other than Heydrich’s assassin, Kubiš, who was badly wounded). The rest had either been killed in the gun battle or used their last bullets to commit suicide, denying the Nazis the privilege of taking them alive. If Hitler was to have his show trial, he would need to find defendants elsewhere.
Bishop Gorazd was not exactly a man of the world, but even he realised that reprisals were inevitable. So, in a brave, staggeringly unconvincing attempt to join that long line of those who felt compelled to deceive in the service of God, he sat down at his desk and penned three letters to senior Nazi officials claiming that he, and he alone, had been responsible for the smuggling of the commandos and everything that happened after it, even down to negotiating with British intelligence. We don’t know what the acting Gestapo chief in Prague thought when a message bearing the letterhead of the Orthodox Bishop of Moravia and Archimandrite of Hopovo Monastery arrived on his desk confessing to the most elaborate act of espionage against the Nazi regime since the start of the war. But we do know that the Germans were not convinced.
Gorazd had tried to sacrifice himself in the hope that the death of a bishop might spare his church and thousands of his countrymen. In this, he failed. Bishop Gorazd, Father Václav Čikl, Father Vladimír Petřek and Jan Sonnevend were taken from their modest little church and subjected to one of the grandest show trials of the Nazi period at the Gestapo headquarters in the gargantuan Petschek Palace in Prague on 3rd September 1942. The result was never in doubt, and the next day, Gorazd, Sonnevend and Cikl were executed by firing squad at an old firing range just outside Prague. Meanwhile, Václav Ornest was sent to Mauthausen with his family, where they perished. Father Petřek, who, the Gestapo discovered, had also quietly been helping to issue baptism certificates to help Jews escape the Holocaust, as well as hiding other partisans, was shot the next day. The Nazi police chief Karl Hermann Frank said after his execution, ‘If the Czech nation is to survive, it cannot be a nation of Petřeks!’ He might as well have said ‘a nation of Gorazds’. Either way, he would have been wrong.
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The most famous of the reprisals for the murder of Reinhard Heydrich was the destruction of Lidice, a small village to the north-west of Prague. On 10th June 1942, long before the Nazis knew where the parachutists were (a day, indeed, before Bishop Gorazd himself knew where they were), a group of German soldiers surrounded the village. They were under orders to eradicate the village. The villagers were split up into groups of men, women and children. The women and children were transferred immediately to the town of Kladno, where they were separated. Most of the women were immediately sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, with the exception of four expectant mothers who, having had their children forcibly aborted, were sent elsewhere. A small group of the children were selected for ‘potential Germanisation’ and moved to German families. The rest were sent to Chelmno death camp where they were gassed. The men were taken to a farm outside the village where, having been lined up against a wall, they were shot in groups of five. The Nazis offered clemency to one man, Josef Štemburk, the priest and de facto leader of the village. One of the seventeen children (out of a hundred and five) who survived and eventually returned to Lidice remembered the old man coming to read stories in the school, where, as he turned the pages, the children would pin his flowing cassock to the floor, causing him to trip as he got up, to the amusement of his young charges. The Nazis offered him the chance to survive in return for calming his flock. The cleric refused, saying: ‘I will die with my sheep.’ He did, and the village was bulldozed.
Gorazd and Štemburk were divided by theology, but they ended their lives in acts of bravery which denied Fascism the absolute control, the absolute victory it sought. They lived out the belief that ‘there is nothing greater than to lay down one’s life for the Gospel of Christ’. That Gospel was one that meant they didn’t run, even in the face of imminent destruction, but, like every good shepherd, felt that it was they who had to lay down their lives for their sheep.
There is a proverb that says that, while other Slavic nations are hardy like oak and need axes to break their spirit, the Czech people are like a willow branch; when pressure is applied, they will bend, and bend, and bend until suddenly they snap back with force. The man born at the place of the hardy little willow might not have snapped back himself, nor were his attempts at hoodwinking those applying the pressure successful, but in his unlikely heroism he more than lived up to the pride of his nation.
The twentieth century was not kind to the peoples of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. After the Second World War came the horrors of Communism, where the cycle of fear, hatred and state-endorsed violence was meted out again on the Czechoslovakian people. They were a nation who knew about sacrifice and, crucially, about survival. Despite the words of Karl Hermann Frank, and, indeed, of Neville Chamberlain, the Czech nation did survive and became famed for its continued indomitable spirit, and, contrary to that prediction made on the shooting range in 1942, it survived precisely because it was a nation of Petřeks, a nation of Štemburks, a nation of Gorazds.