HHhH / Laurent Binet

   SO: this book took me a very long time to read. I started it sometime last year, and have been sending it back and forth to the library ever since. I took a long break from it when I was listening to the audiobook of Army of Evil : A History of the SS. There are only so many books about the SS or the SD or Nazism in general that you can read at one time before it starts to tell on you. But, after some consideration, I sent Army of Evil back to the library and picked up HHhH again and at last: I have finished it. I'm glad I made the switch.

  Laurent Binet wants you to know the struggles behind writing a historical account and the allure of fictionalization. The book is labeled as a novel on the cover, but Binet goes to great lengths to research the events he's writing about, and loathes making up conversations or situations (or so he says. Reading William Goldman has given me a severe distrust of authors who break the fourth wall). He agonizes over what to include and what to leave out and how to do justice to the people who were the Czech (and Slovak) Resistance during WWII. He's been studying Operation Anthropoid for years and this book is the result.

   Operation Anthropoid, what is it? The year is 1942 and Reinhard Heydrich is the man in charge in Czechoslovakia. He is also the person who came up with the Final Solution, and was instrumental in the development and organization of the SS and SD. "HHhH" stands for Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich, which means "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich". Basically, this is an evil man. So: two men, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, are tasked with assassinating him.

   While they weren't initially successful in killing Heydrich, he did die a few days after the assassination attempt due to some sort of infection, no one really knows the exact cause. Cue reprisals. The Gestapo couldn't find Gabčík and Kubiš at first, but that didn't stop them from completely destroying two villages, Lidice and Ležáky, killing hundreds of people, and offering rewards until finally a man came forward and betrayed Gabčík and Kubiš, as well as much of the anti-Nazi organization in Prague. The story of the assassination comes to an end when Gabčík, Kubiš, and many people who were working with them are all either dead or soon to be dead. Karel Čurda, who betrayed them, went on to act as a Gestapo spy for the rest of the war. He was hanged in 1947.

    I believe it is important to remember what has come before, and that doing so helps us understand how we got here, and maybe somehow honours the people who were brave and true, and reminds us to be vigilant, and that using "but it's sad/depressing" as an excuse to not read history is the worst. And so I encourage you to find events you don't know much about and then find books about those events and then read them. Maybe it'll be this book, maybe it'll be another one, either way, reading about history is important, don't fail to do it.