HHhH

by Laurent Binet

I’M FIGHTING A losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect – and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it – ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy – the unmappable pattern of causality. I examine a map of Prague, marking the locations of the families who helped and sheltered the parachutists. Almost all of them paid with their lives – men, women, and children. The Svatoš family, a few feet from the Charles Bridge; the Ogoun family, near the castle; the Novak, Moravec, Zelenka, and Fafek families, all farther east. Each member of each of these families would deserve his or her own book – an account of their involvement with the Resistance until the tragic dénouement of Mauthausen. How many forgotten heroes sleep in history’s great cemetery? Thousands, millions of Fafeks and Moravecs, of Novaks and Zelenkas … The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory. No reader could possibly retain this list of names, so why write it? For you to re...

The total was written at the bottom of the page: more than eleven million. The mission would be half accomplished.

THINK ALL men for whom life is not an endless series of misfortunes are bound to experience, at least once, a moment they consider, rightly or wrongly, to be the apotheosis of their existence.