People, Places, and Events Behind the Headlines in History
Two major motion pictures that competed for Academy Awards on March 4, 2018, center on the spring of 1940.
Dunkirk recalls what has been called one of the most famous events in modern British history--the evacuation of more than 300,000 stranded soldiers by a fleet of small leisure and fishing boats on May 10 of that year.
The film was directed by Christopher Nolan and distributed by Warner Brothers. Released in July, 2017, Dunkirk grossed $527 million at the box office. It can be streamed on Netflix, HBO Now and HBO Max. It is also available for purchase or rent on other sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_(2017_film)
Darkest Hour details the greatest challenge in Winston Churchill’s life--in May and June of 1940 when Hitler could have won World War II.
The film was directed by Joe Wright and distributed by Focus Features and Universal Pictures. It was released in September 2017 and grossed $150.8 million. It can be viewed on Netflix, HBO Max and HBO Now, and the Amazon Channel. Darkest Hour (film) - Wikipedia
The films, nominated for a combined 13 Oscars and winning in sound and film editing as well as the best actor award for Gary Oldman, illustrate the power that familiar stories of history can still exert. Many instantly recognize the name Dunkirk and many can recite portions of Churchill’s famous speech to Parliament (“we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”)
Yet the films resonate with audiences because they show other sides of these stories: the French soldier who tries to blend in and escape with British troops as ships load on the docks of Dunkirk, the father and son pair who take their small sailing vessel to sea to rescue as many soldiers as they can, the British pilot who continues the battle until his plane runs out of fuel, the Prime Minister who struggles to find the right path, the right words.
There are many not-so-famous stories, what I call Historka or The Other Stories, that are equally powerful. Some have been largely forgotten or only recently revealed in scattered or incomplete documents. Some, such as the ones I’ll be relating here in this blog, take place during the Second World War.
Assassination
The first of Historka, The Other Stories, is a series of posts that stems from the incident at the beginning of my debut novel, The Pear Tree. In the opening pages of that book, the leader of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia Reinhard Heydrich is attacked by a pair of Czech Resistance fighters as his limousine rounds a hairpin turn along the Vltava River in a Prague suburb in 1942. After Heydrich’s death from blood poisoning days later, the Nazi High Command exacts grievous reprisal--total destruction of the small Czech town of Lidice.
This author’s The Pear Tree uses the assassination and the destruction of the town as stepping-off points to tell individual stories of a handful of survivors who are thrust into the horrors of war and find heroism in small acts of kindness.
The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich is a highly dramatic story in and of itself, as shown in two recent films. The Man with the Iron Heart, a French-Belgian production filmed in English, stars Jason Clarke as Heydrich, Rosamund Pike as his wife, Jack O’Connell and Jack Reynor as the assassins. The film is based on the international best seller and winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman book award in 2012 HHhH (Himmler’s Hirn heist Heydrich, or Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich). Released in 2017, The Man with the Iron Heart earned $4.4 million at the box office.
Another film, Anthropoid, views the assassination through the eyes of two assassins. The film stars Jaime Dornan (Fifty Shades of Grey and The Fallen) as the Czech operative Jan Kubiš and Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) as the Slovak Josef Gabčik. It was released in 2016 and grossed more than $5 million.
Older films include Operation Daybreak, released in 1974, and Hangmen Also Die from Fritz Lang in 1943.
Among many documentaries are SS-3 The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, (1992), Last Day of the Butcher (2021), and the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague (2019).
Books add details about the planning and execution of the assassination: Assassination: Operation Anthropoid, 1941-1942 (2002), The Mirror Caught the Sun (2009), and You’ll Be Hearing from Us (2019).
The telling and retelling of the Heydrich assassination is not surprising. After all, it succeeded.
But there were many assassination attempts during the early days of the Nazi regime and well into the war years.
(One of these did came to the screen in 2008 as Valkyrie, the nail-biting historical political thriller that recounts Operation Valkyrie, a plan by a group of German Army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler and launch a national emergency plan to take control of the country. The film stars Tom Cruise as the principal plotter Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and also includes Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, and Tom Wilkinson.)
The other assassination attempts are little more than bullet points on Wikipedia. The times, dates, and places, individuals involved, and reasons for their failure are not all that well remembered. Historka begins its posts by filling in the details about these events.
The first post next month describes Heydrich’s assassination; subsequent posts go back in time to the first attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1921 and finish with the Valkyrie plan in 1944.
In addition to factual recollections of the events, perpetrators, investigators, and reprisals, posts include fictional interpretations, when possible. The objective is to highlight the people, places, and circumstances that fall below the headlines of history by comparing fact with fiction.
As Historka tells these and Other Stories, it also invites readers to contribute stories of their own, to discuss the other sides of history as they are depicted in drama, theater, and literature and reveal more about well-known as well as lesser-known events and how they are told. Historka will look for Other Stories in history and fiction and hopes readers will join the search.
Sources:
The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich, Callum Macdonald, The Free Press, 1989.
Anthropoid, Wikipedia; The Man with the Iron Heart, Wikipedia. Dunkirk, Wikipedia. Darkest Hour, Wikipedia. Operation Daybreak and Hangmen Also Die (Wikipedia).