Seven Men at Daybreak [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE I remember vividly how he opened the large hide-bound volume and flipped open its pages until he came to the section full of names which had been carefully ruled through with a line of red ink. "A story here," said Mr. Wittmer, "to make your hair stand on end!" The volume, it appeared, was one of the original records kept by the authorities of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, though I hasten to add that this story has nothing whatsoever to do with concentration camps. The year was 1950. The place was Arolsen, a small town in northern Bavaria, where the International Tracing Service working within the orbit of the International Refugee Organization, had its headquarters. Mr. Wittmer was its Deputy Director. At that time I was in the process of writing a B.B.C. feature program about the Tracing Service which I later entitled with, I am afraid, a certain pretentiousness, "The Greatest Detective Story in History." However, from the moment Mr. Wittmer put me on the trail of Jan Kubis and Josef Gabchik, I have wanted to write their story. To get to the heart of the matter meant visiting Czechoslovakia, and soon it became obvious that political events made it almost impossible to go there, and certainly quite impossible to do any research there. It was not until the spring of 1958 that I was able to fulfill my ambition. I am grateful to the Czech Ministry of Information for allowing my visit and putting no obstacles in the way of my research. On the other hand I formed the definite opinion that because Jan Kubis and Josef Gabchik and the others were trained in Britain, and the operation as a whole ix PROLOGUE That night, at an altitude of two thousand feet, the huge Halifax aircraft roared out of the sky above the winter countryside of Czechoslovakia. The four airscrews churned through the drifts of low broken cloud, flailing them back against the wet black flanks of the machine, and in the cold fuselage Jan Kubis and Josef Gabchik stared down at their homeland through the open, cofiBn-shaped exit hatch cut in the floor. HaUfax Automatically they checked the release boxes and static lines of their parachute harnesses. Within minutes they were to plunge down through that darkness to the earth below, knowing that they were the first parachutists to come back to Czechoslovakia, and knowing also that their mission was as unique and hazardous as any that had yet been conceived. The taller of the two, Jan Kubis, was twenty-seven years old and five feet ten inches in height. He had fair hair and gray, deep-set eyes which looked out at the world steadily from under pronounced brows. His mouth was 1