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Himmler himself fainted while attending one of these mass executions.
I remember one interminable digression in The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the workings of judicial institutions in the Middle Ages.
There is nothing more artificial in a historical narrative than this kind of dialogue—reconstructed from more or less firsthand accounts with the idea of breathing life into the dead pages of history.
When I say “I have to,” I do not mean, of course, that it’s absolutely necessary. I could easily tell the whole story of Operation Anthropoid without even once mentioning Lina Heydrich’s name. Then again, if I am to portray Heydrich’s character, which I would very much like to do, it’s difficult to ignore the role played by his wife in his ascent within Nazi Germany.
Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else as utterly evil as Hitler.
Stalin
In other words, when the Nazi leaders are—for once—ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Führer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honor and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes.
the key is to make the victims collaborate in their own murder. Despoiled yesterday, destroyed tomorrow.
At this point Heydrich, who is fond of numbers, pricks up his ears: “Twenty to thirty million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and the problems of food supply.”
As usual, I think of Oscar Wilde. It’s the same old story: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
In silence, Göring dates and signs what will become for history the Ermächtigung: the authorization.
It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.
Then Heydrich inspects the troops while a second banner is hoisted next to the swastika that flies above the castle and the town: a black flag embossed with two runic Ss, signaling that another rung has been climbed on the ladder of terror. From now on, Bohemia and Moravia are, almost officially, the first SS state.
The courts now have only two options, whatever the charges: acquittal or death. Czechs are sentenced to death for distributing pamphlets, selling goods on the black market, or simply listening to foreign radio stations.
No German should say that a Czech is a decent person.
In the long term, these non-Germanizable elements—who we estimate at about half the population—can be transferred later to the Arctic, where we are building concentration camps for the Russians.
Notice, by the way, this discreet and euphemistic metonymy: “to the East.” Although his audience doesn’t know it, what Heydrich means by this is “to Poland,” and more specifically “to Auschwitz.”
I know everything it’s possible to know about this flight. I know what Gabčík and Kubiš had in their backpacks: a pocketknife, a pistol with two magazines and twelve cartridges, a cyanide pill, a piece of chocolate, meat-extract tablets, razor blades, a fake ID card, and some Czech currency. I know they were wearing civilian clothes made in Czechoslovakia. I know that, following orders, they didn’t say anything to their fellow parachutists during the flight apart from “Hello” and “Good Luck.” I know that their fellow parachutists suspected they were being sent to kill Heydrich. I know that it
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So, to cut a long story short, they jumped.
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.
How many forgotten heroes sleep in history’s great cemetery?
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 remember them, I would have to turn them into characters.
History, I know that. But if a novel is as boring as a scientific book…” He also felt that he was writing “in a deplorable academic style,” and then “what bothers [him] is the psychological aspect of [his] story,” all the more so as he must “make people think in a language in which they never thought!”
It is through dialogue that he turns history into fiction.
So he bases his tale on a true story, fully exploiting its novelistic elements, blithely inventing when that helps the narration, but without being answerable to history. He’s a skillful cheat. A trickster. Well … a novelist, basically.
It is essential to sort out the Czech teachers because the teaching profession is a breeding ground for opposition. It must be destroyed, and all Czech secondary schools must be shut. The Czech youth must be torn away from this subversive atmosphere and educated elsewhere. I cannot think of a better place for this than a sports ground. With sport and physical education, we will simultaneously guarantee their development, their education, and their reeducation.
Once again I find myself frustrated by my genre’s constraints. No ordinary novel would encumber itself with three characters sharing the same name—unless the author were after a very particular effect.
This fear of the German! It’s like a man who beats his dog: the dog may sometimes refuse to obey his master, but he will never turn on him.
It’s true that the Nazis were supplied in bulk by Opel, and so it’s perfectly plausible that Blobel possessed, or used, a vehicle of that make. But plausible is not known.
Modern novels are all about narrative economy, that’s just how it is, and mine can’t keep ignoring this parsimonious logic.
This is what I think: inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.
So Holešovice it is: this curve that no longer exists, swallowed up by a highway ramp and by modernity, which couldn’t care less about my memories.
I feel a great repulsion and mistrust for someone like Bousquet, but when I think of his assassin, of the immense historical loss that his act represents, of the revelations the trial would have produced and which he has forever denied us, I feel overwhelmed by hate. He didn’t kill any innocents, that’s true, but he is a destroyer of truth. And all so he could appear on TV for three minutes! What a monstrous, stupid, Warholian piece of shit!
Pasternak wrote: “I don’t like people who are indifferent to truth.”
He considers the Blond Beast much more intelligent than all the other Nazi dignitaries.
I think I’m beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel.
“Yet have I something in me dangerous,” says Hamlet, at a similar moment.
cover death’s hideous iron fist in the sumptuous velvet glove of the struggle.
I make a quick inventory of all the times in my life when I’ve had to show sangfroid. What a joke! On each occasion, the stakes were tiny: a broken leg, a night in custody, a rejection. There you go, that’s pretty much all I’ve ever risked in the course of my pathetic existence. How could I convey even the tiniest idea of what those three men lived through?
Feel the wind of history as it begins, gently, to blow. Watch as all the actors in this drama—from the dawn of time in the twelfth century, up until the present and Natacha—file past in my mind. And then retain only five names: Heydrich, Klein, Valčík, Kubiš, and Gabčík.
am spreading myself too thinly. Everything I read takes me farther and farther away from the curve in Holešovice Street.
“Poor workers or sick people, you must always struggle against those who tell you: ‘Work hard to live badly.’”
Heydrich is never late. He’s not coming. But obviously I wouldn’t have written this whole book if Heydrich wasn’t coming.
I am struck by this revelation: history is a prophet who says “We.”
the worst creature ever forged in the burning fires of hell,
To save Heydrich, they would need something that is not to be found anywhere in the vast territory of the Reich: penicillin.
Their sacrifice would be completely in vain. Gabčík and Kubiš weep from rage and powerlessness, but they end up being convinced. All the same, no one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything. Perhaps I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong.
How is it possible to know so much and yet so little about people, a story, historical events that you’ve lived with for years?
It’s total chaos. It’s the Alamo.
Both the Alamo and Thermopylae.
In the tales and legends of old Prague, the city of alchemists, it’s said that the Golem will return when the city is in danger. But the Golem did not come back to protect the Jews or the Czechs. Nor, frozen in his centuries-old curse, did the iron man move when they opened Terezín, or when they killed people, when they despoiled, bullied, tortured, deported, shot, gassed, executed them in every conceivable way.
