In the winter of 1941, two soldiers of the Czechoslovak army in exile jumped from a British plane over occupied Bohemia. Jozef Gabčík was Slovak, Jan Kubiš was Czech, and their orders were to kill Reinhard Heydrich, the SS security chief who now ruled the country from Prague Castle. They could not have done it alone. This walk is about the people who helped them: a clerk, two sisters, a Jewish family's bicycle, households that opened their doors, and what it cost them. It runs from Heydrich's castle through Malá Strana, Josefov and the Old Town to the Gestapo headquarters, and ends at a bullet-scarred window on Resslova Street, about five kilometers in all. It is one of our self-guided walking tours built around a true story.

Before you set off

The walking takes about an hour and a quarter; with the stories, allow two and a half hours. The first stretch runs downhill from the castle, and there is one long leg across the New Town near the end. The castle courtyard has a security check at the gates. Most stops are house fronts and plaques, so go in daylight. The walk ends near Charles Square, which has a metro station. Inside the church at the end is the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror, with free entry; check its opening days before you go. The church is a working cathedral, so keep your voice down inside.

Prague Castle, First Courtyard

You're in the First Courtyard of Prague Castle, the ceremonial entrance behind the Matthias Gate. Nothing here marks 1942, but this is where it begins.

In September 1941 Reinhard Heydrich arrived as acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. In his first two months, special courts sentenced 342 people to death. That November he set up the ghetto at Terezín, and in January 1942, at Wannsee, he presented the plans for the "Final Solution". He lived in a chateau about 20 kilometers north of Prague and was driven in to his office here.

Inside this castle worked a Czech clerk in the economic office, František Šafařík. He passed Heydrich's movements to the resistance, including a last report on his route into Prague, about ten days before the attack.

You may hear a legend that Heydrich put on the crown of Saint Wenceslas and its curse killed him. There is no evidence he ever wore it.

Now a step forward in time. On the evening of June 5, 1942, Heydrich came back to this castle in a coffin, on a gun carriage, through streets lined with SS men carrying torches. The coffin lay in state here in the First Courtyard for two days. At the ceremony on June 7, Himmler sat in the front row.

How he got there is the story of this walk. Leave through the gate onto Hradčany Square and follow your map downhill into Malá Strana, to Letenská Street, about fifteen minutes.

Letenská No. 2

Prague Castle lit up in the evening You're at Letenská 2, near Malostranská metro. There is no plaque here. On the ground floor lived two sisters, Marie Kovárníková and Ludmila Soukupová.

Gabčík and Kubiš had landed near the village of Nehvizdy, not where they were meant to, and now they had to pass as locals, one of them with a Slovak accent. Through the spring of 1942, the sisters often walked them around Prague. A resistance man, Bedřich Kubice, worked in this building, and Šafařík's reports from the castle were delivered here. So Heydrich's timetable passed through this door.

Kubiš fell in love with Marie. The day after the attack, he came here and told her that he had killed Heydrich.

On June 25, the building's superintendent denounced the sisters. The Gestapo arrested them as the assassins' girlfriends. It never learned what they had really done. That did not save them. Both were executed at Mauthausen on October 24, 1942, a date you will hear again on this walk.

The men also needed a way to get around. Cross the Vltava by the Mánes Bridge and follow your map into Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, to Elišky Krásnohorské Street, about thirteen minutes.

Elišky Krásnohorské No. 2

Find number 2 and look for the plaque on the house. Prague 1 unveiled it in 2020, for the Bergman, Bondy and Holzner families.

This is the story of a bicycle. It belonged to Lydie Holznerová, later Bondyová. When the Nazi rules barred Jews from owning bicycles, she gave hers away to a colleague. From there it passed from hand to hand until it reached the Moravec family in Žižkov, who were helping the parachutists. The men used bicycles to scout Heydrich's route. And on the morning of the attack, it was this ladies' bicycle, once a Jewish girl's, that Gabčík rode.

He left it at the scene. Soon the whole city would be staring at it.

Sources differ on how the Gestapo reached this family, but it was caught in the arrests that followed. Lydie, Frieda Holznerová, Zdenko Bergman, Dr Alexandr Bondy and Hilda Bondyová were sentenced to death that September and executed at Mauthausen on October 24, 1942. Dr Jiří Bondy did not live to see the sentence; guards had beaten him to death at Terezín, probably that July. They were Jewish, persecuted twice over, and they died for helping.

Now to the heart of the Old Town, where the parachutists met the home resistance and where Gabčík ran after the attack. Follow your map south to Old Town Square, about eight minutes.