Reincarnated: Vive La France

The day after the last shots, Prague awoke to the German trucks.

Yet as the city's clocks struck seven, the baker opened his shop.

The trams ran.

At the newsstand, people queued in silence for papers printed in two languages.

Order the German broadcasts promised it on every radio frequency had arrived.

But in every heart, something restless turned.

Captain Veselý moved through Prague's side streets with a limp, one arm in a rough sling.

The night before, he'd watched half his company die at the western approaches, fighting until the barrels of their rifles melted, then falling back by alley and canal, scattering into the city like sparks from a dying fire.

Now, all that remained was a dozen men scraped, burned, hungry, half in civilian dress.

He ducked into a boarded-up bar, a hand on his pistol.

The password was exchanged quietly three knocks, then two.

Inside, the fugitive survivors of the 3rd Regiment waited in the shadows.

Veselý's sergeant, Brůna, gave a nod. "They're setting up checkpoints every two blocks. No one in uniform survives. They shot that boy from the hospital barely sixteen."

Veselý ground his teeth. "How many weapons?"

Brůna pulled a tattered cloth from a crate two rifles, one revolver, a broken machine-gun. "And a box of grenades, if you trust the old fuses."

A young private, Hanuš, spat on the floor. "They say the bigwigs at the Castle ran before sunrise. Soldiers left holding the city while the suits slip out the back."

Veselý shook his head. "You speak that way again, I'll shoot you myself. We're not traitors. Not while we're breathing."

Brůna grinned, wolfish. "What now?"

"We lie low, wait, watch. The first fool who tries heroics gets everyone killed. When we move, we move together. No glory, just damage."

In the back, someone started to sing a fragment of the anthem, but Brůna hushed him.

Outside, German loudspeakers crackled.

"Any civilian caught aiding partisans will be shot. Curfew is eight. The city is under the protection of the Reich."

The men listened, and waited for darkness.

Petr Novák limped through the southern quarter, his left hand tight over a blood-soaked handkerchief.

At the mouth of a narrow lane, he nearly stumbled over an old woman sweeping water from her stoop.

"Get inside," she hissed. "The patrols come soon."

He hesitated, swaying.

She looked him over, took in the uniform jacket, the wound. "Fool boy. Come on."

Inside, the house was tiny.

She pressed a cup into his hands. "Who are you?"

"Novák," he whispered. "Petr."

Her eyes flashed. "I had a son Petr. Buried in Galicia. All our boys come home the same silent, hunted."

She pressed bread and a little honey into his hand. "The Germans have lists. Names. If you have family, tell them nothing. If you leave, don't come back."

He drank, already stronger. "Where can I go?"

She leaned in, lowering her voice. "The woods. Some men from the north meet near the old brewery after curfew. If you run, run far. Don't wait."

He squeezed her hand. "Thank you."

She smiled, fierce as any general. "You fight for all of us. Don't waste your second chance."

Anna Šimková woke up.

The schoolhouse was gone commandeered for a German barracks.

Her last act, before they broke the door, had been to hide the flag and burn the attendance records.

Now, every morning, she watched the square for familiar faces her students, their parents, the old janitor.

The Germans posted new notices on the square.

"Report all weapons. Report all radios. Report suspicious persons."

Anna joined a line at the bakery.

A woman whispered behind her, "Did you hear about Father Karel? Gone last night. His books burned."

Anna turned, heart pounding. "Did they find anything?"

"No one says."

They bought their bread in silence.

Back in her apartment, Anna pried up the floorboard beneath her bed beneath it, her father's old revolver, two silver spoons, and a tattered copy of Masaryk's "The Czech Question."

She stared at the gun.

She wasn't sure if she wanted to hide, use, or hand it off to someone braver.

A knock at the door.

She froze.

A voice.

"It's me, Eva."

Her friend slipped inside, cheeks flushed. "The radio London says they're with us. Moscow, too. They read out a list of the dead. Someone is counting."

Anna nodded. "It matters. It must."

Eva pressed a small leaflet into her hand.

On it, in black ink.

"CZECHS, DO NOT BOW. HISTORY WATCHES."

"Give it to someone you trust," Eva whispered, then vanished into the morning.

Marta, wrapped in her mother's old shawl, moved through the city like a ghost.

She had been at the Castle when the government collapsed.

She saw Beneš leave, his face gray, his briefcase clutched like a lifeline.

Now the Germans swaggered through the marble halls, barking orders to Czech clerks, hanging banners, measuring rooms for portraits of the Führer.

She walked by the square where the new puppet prime minister gave his first address under German guns.

He promised order, prosperity, and the "protection of Czech heritage."

No one cheered.

Marta locked eyes with a university student her brother's friend, once quick to laugh.

He mouthed, "Tonight, Charles Bridge, the usual place."

She nodded and moved on.

That night, across Prague and Brno, the Children of the Republic slipped into alleys and basements, passing secret notes, relaying rumors and codes.

Two girls were stopped by a German patrol.

"Why are you out after curfew?" The officer's Czech was harsh, clumsy.

One girl, Petra, smiled. "We were helping our aunt at the hospital. She's sick."

The other, Ivana, clung to her friend's arm, shaking.

The officer studied them, then motioned them away.

They ducked around the corner, breathless.

"Tomorrow, it will be harder," Ivana whispered.

Petra nodded. "Then tonight, we run."

They delivered their bundle to a nurse at the hospital a stack of typewritten pages, names of new informers, rumors of executions in the north, a list of safe houses already compromised.

The nurse burned the pages as soon as she'd memorized them.

In a narrow valley near Kolín, resistance was less careful.

At midnight, Veselý led five men through the birch woods.

They reached the telegraph linebwatched, as always, by two bored Wehrmacht guards.

Brůna crawled forward, wire cutters gleaming in his fist.

The guards dozed.

The first cable snapped, sparking.

The Germans roused Brůna's knife found the first man's throat.

Veselý fired at the second.

In Pardubice, Anna joined a group in a ruined farmhouse a priest, two widows, a former railway man.

"What now?" the priest asked, hands shaking.

Anna unwrapped the revolver, placed it on the table.

"We wait. We gather food. We listen. When it's safe, we'll pass information to Prague."

A widow pressed her husband's ring into Anna's palm. "For luck. He fought the last war. Said luck's all we have when the world goes mad."

Elsewhere, not all were so bold.

Colonel Straka, who had surrendered his regiment without a shot in Ústí, sat alone in his flat.

He penned a letter to the new German administrator, promising his "loyalty to the new order" in exchange for clemency for his men.

His wife watched him with contempt.

"You could have died with them," she spat.

Straka only shook his head. "I will live. Someone must remember the names of the lost."

She left him alone, the letter unsigned on the desk.

Marta found her way to Charles Bridge as the city's curfew deepened.

The rain was gone, the Vltava black and wide.

A small group stood beneath the statue of St. John, shivering.

The leader a tall student with a broken nose addressed them in whispers.

"We have friends in the French consulate. They send news out when they can. Tomorrow, we need new codes, new runners. They're already closing in on us."

Marta asked, "What about arms?"

The leader shrugged. "The forests. Maybe the Soviets send airdrops. Maybe not. For now, we fight with words. And memory."

He handed Marta a scrap of paper. On it.

"REMEMBER LIDICE."

She slipped it into her sleeve.

As dawn approached, the city felt almost normal.

Bakers set out trays of bread.

Trams rattled down the boulevards.

Children some in new German-style uniforms walked in lines to schools where Czech was no longer spoken.

But in the corners, in the spaces between footsteps, defiance coiled.

A woman swept her steps, pausing to draw a small lion in chalk before the German guard could see.

A tram conductor whistled the anthem in three notes, then stopped.

A doctor stitched a wounded partisan's arm, risking everything for one more day.

In a hidden room, a battered radio crackled.

"…do not lose faith. The world has not forgotten Prague, nor Brno, nor the fields where you stood. The Republic endures in your hearts. Stand fast justice will come."

Veselý, hiding in the woods, heard it through static.

Anna, in her farmhouse, pressed her palm to the table, breathing the words like prayer.

In Prague, Petr crouched behind rubble, hands filthy, heart hammering.

He whispered, "I am not alone."

Not everyone would survive the first months.

Some were betrayed by neighbors, by informers, by their own exhaustion.

Some were hanged in city squares, their names posted for all to see.

Some vanished, never found, never named.

But the resistance grew.

In every act, great or small, the battered heart of Czechoslovakia kept beating.

And in every whispered promise, every risk taken in darkness, the people remembered.

They were down, but not defeated.

They were lost, but not gone.

The day would come.