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fought bravely, he had simply decided that life mattered more than anything else in the world and had contrived to cling to it. In those years he had seen heroes, and how they went about their work, how they did what had to be done, and he knew he was not one of them.
    The train was late getting into Prague. A Jewish family had attempted to board at Nürnberg, the last stop on German soil. Jews had been strongly “encouraged” to emigrate from Germany—not least by a hundred and thirty-five racial decrees, together entitled “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor”—to whatever country would accept them. But the situation, Szara knew, was not unlike that under the czar: a bureaucratic spider web. While you could get Paper A stamped at the local police station, the stamp on Paper B, received from the Economic Ministry, was now out of date and would have to be applied for allover again. Meanwhile, Paper A ran its term and automatically revoked itself.
    The Jewish family at Nürnberg simply attempted to board the train, a pointless act of desperation. Thus young children, grandparents, mother and father, scampered in terror all around the station while policemen in leather coats chased them down, shouting and blowing whistles. Meanwhile, the passengers peered curiously from the train windows. Some, excited by the chase, tried to help, calling out, “There, under the baggage cart!” or “She's crossed the tracks!”
    Just after midnight it was cold in Prague, there were frost flowers on the paving stones, but the hotel was not far from the station, and Szara was soon settled in his room. He stayed up for hours, smoking, writing notes on the margin of Le Temps, studying the baggage ticket he'd been given. He was being drawn into something he did not understand, but he had a strong intuition about what awaited him at the end of it.
    This extramarital affair with the services had been simple in the beginning, five or six years earlier, for they'd used him as an intellectual, an agent of influence, and he'd liked it, found it flattering to be trusted. Now he had gotten in over his head, and he had no doubt it would kill him. They were using him for something important, an official operation of the apparat or, and here was the death sentence, the plotting of a cabal within it. He only knew it was very dark and very serious. Soviet generals of military intelligence did not board German trains to chat with writers.
    Nonetheless, he refused to blind himself to the possibility of exits. He would die, he thought, but did not want to discover as he died that there had been, after all, a way out. That is the difference, comrade General, between the hero and the survivor. The hours of reflection revealed nothing, but did serve to dissipate tension and tire him out. He crawled into bed and slept without dreams.
    He woke to a day of light snow and subtle terror in Prague. He saw nothing, felt everything. On the fifth of November, Hitler had madea speech once again declaring the urgency, for Germany, of Lebensraum, the acquisition of new territory for German growth and expansion, literally “room to live.” Like an operatic tenor, singing counterpoint to Hitler's bass, Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, pleaded publicly in an open letter carried by Czech newspapers the following day for a halt to Czech “persecution” of German minorities in the Sudetenland, the area bordering southern Germany. On 12 November the countertenor, Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, said on the radio: “Race and nationality, blood and soil, are the principles of National Socialist thought, we would be acting in contradiction if we attempted to assimilate a foreign nationality by force.”
    This may have sounded warm and comforting in France, but the Sudeten Germans were not a foreign nationality, and neither were the Austrians—not according to German diplomatic definitions. Sudeten German representatives next staged a