THE WOODEN KING
Copyright © 2018
Thomas McConnell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
A version of “1940” was serialized in south85.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McConnell, Thomas, author.
Title: The wooden king / Thomas McConnell.
Description: Spartanburg, SC : Hub City Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017032054| ISBN 9781938235375 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781938235368 (Ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945–Czechoslovakia–Fiction. Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | War stories.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C3817 W66 2018 | DDC 813/.6–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032054
Cover images: ©Shutterstock / Peter Vrabel; Elizabeth Addie Becker
Book design: Meg Reid
Copy editor: Kalee Lineberger
Proofreader: Megan DeMoss
HUB CITY PRESS
186 W. Main Street
Spartanburg, SC 29306
864.327.8515
This book is for John Abraham McConnell and all my Czech friends.
CONTENTS
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1948
Acknowledgements
About the Book
They came through the snow, trucks of infantry, motorcycles with men in trench coats riding the sidecars, platoons by bicycle hurling back the barriers at the frontiers for half-tracks, a few tanks, armored cars. A dress rehearsal for Poland six months later. Hitler himself came in the secure evening and the next day processed through the cities in his bullet-proof Mercedes. In the clamorous squares children peeked out from forests of legs to glimpse him, to wave little red flags with broken crosses while their cheering parents among the German minority gave the salute. The Ides of March, 1939. Their infamous day.
In Munich the fall before, Chamberlain and Daladier had cast the die, assigned to Hitler all he needed to render the country indefensible. Across the table the statesmen shook hands over the dissected map of what had been Czechoslovakia. No Czech was in the room while their nation was dismembered. Hungary hacked away a whole province. Poland gouged its portion. Slovakia was amputated into independence but might as well have been kept in a jar in Berlin.
So under a March snow their republic melted into the haze of the past and a new word came into the language for Hitler’s man in the castle: Reichsprotektor. A new word for the land he ruled: Protektorate. Czechs had known twenty years as a free people since that day in Philadelphia at the end of the Great War when their liberator, their first president, Thomas Masaryk, had declared their birth in a street beside Independence Hall. For the rest of his life Masaryk reasoned with his countrymen, goaded them together toward middle Europe’s first democracy until, exhausted at eighty-seven, he died when they needed his wisdom most. He was spared the fate of his country as his two successors were not. The bookish one, Benes, resigned after the disaster at Munich and went into exile. The old judge, Hacha, the last alternative, a grandfather doting on senility, collapsed across a carpet in Hitler’s chancellery the night of the invasion. He had to be revived with an injection so he could sign the death warrant for the corpse that remained. And the assassination was complete.
What the people inherited was the gun and the Gestapo, the parading field gray of the Wehrmacht and thugs on the corners. Jews lost their jobs. The universities, except the ones for Germans, were closed. The blackouts began and the whispering. Schools became jails, the palaces of Bohemian kings became prisons, beams in their cellars hung with nooses of wire. So the people waited in line for black bread and bits of meat, for the will to go on and whatever the gods of fate or the lords of war would bring them.
Watching the great wet flakes descend on the eve of spring they parted their lace curtains with almost steady hands and looked out at the boots and tires splashing through their streets. Breaths misting on the pane, they murmured to one another, “It’s bad.”
Now that the history of their country had come to an end he told the boy stories of the brave little Czech nation, and night after night Aleks listened, though the hour stretched his mouth into yawns. When the time came to switch off the light the boy delayed the dark with questions. Trn listened to them all.
“This morning, when we were walking to school? Remember? Why did you pull me over the ice, like I was skiing?”
“Because I thought it might make you laugh.”
“Oh.” In his fist he tried to hide a long yawn.
“Why don’t you teach me German?”
“You don’t need German.”
“But you know German.”
“I had to study it in school.”
“When you were as old as me? In the empire?”
“Yes. Under the empire.”
“Viktor?”
“Mother’s calling you,” the boy said.
“I will go in a moment.”
“Mr. Director says that we will all begin to learn German next year.”
“We will see,” Trn said.
Aleks turned his face away, his head deep in the pillow.
“Will there be aeroplanes tonight?”
“No. No aeroplanes tonight.”
“In Poland they had aeroplanes.”
“That’s true. But we’re a long distance from Poland.”
“The windows are covered?”
“You saw me hang the blankets, remember?”
He laid a hand at the boy’s elbow, reached and found his hand.
“Viktor. Let him go to sleep now.”
“Should you make sure? At the edges?”
“I will. I promise. As soon as you’re asleep.”
The