THE SECRET MIRACLE ("El milagro secreto")

Short Story by Jorge Luis Borges, 1944

"The Secret Miracle" ("El milagro secreto") was written by Jorge Luis Borges at the height of the Second World War in 1943 and was published in 1944 when it appeared in his renowned collection of short stories Ficciones. Set in Nazi-occupied Prague, "The Secret Miracle" is the story of a Jewish playwright, Jaromir Hladík, who is arrested by the Germans and is quickly sentenced to death for his dissenting views of the Third Reich. As his date of execution approaches, he becomes increasingly concerned about his legacy as a writer and in particular with his unfinished play entitled The Enemies. As he struggles to formulate and develop the plot in his head, he realizes he needs more time in order to complete his masterpiece. In the solitude of his cell he asks God to grant him one more year to complete his project, and thus, on the eve of his execution, the protagonist has an unsettling oneiric experience: he dreams that he searches for God among the thousands of volumes contained in the Clementine Library (an authentic building in Prague). As he awakens from his dream, he hears a rewarding voice that assures him, "The time for your labor has been granted." Precisely on schedule, at 8:44 a.m., the guards arrive in his cell and escort him to the patio where the firing squad awaits. At 9:00 a.m. the sergeant raises his arm and gives the order to fire, but at that instant Hladík sees the world around him freeze. Time is suddenly stopped. He wonders if he has gone to hell or if he might be dead or perhaps crazy. Soon, however, he realizes that God has granted his wish. He has witnessed a secret miracle and has been given a one-year respite to complete his play. He immediately sets out to work and begins the writing process, rewriting the play word by word, scene by scene, aided only by his memory. In a year's time he is finished. His task is suddenly complete, and time picks up where it had left off before: "He began a maddened cry, he shook his head, and the fourfold volley felled him." In the last line of the story the narrator lets the implicit reader know that Hladík died that same morning barely two minutes after nine o'clock.

"The Secret Miracle" has been subject to various readings and interpretations. While some scholars have attempted to read the story as a mere intellectual game that blurs the line between the real and the fantastic, between what can be interpreted as a real occurrence or as a vivid oneiric experience, others have suggested that it may be read as a play within a play though presented in narrative form, thus suggesting this could have been Borges's one and only attempt to experiment with drama, a genre that always eluded the author.

Yet, to suggest that Borges's stories deal ultimately with writing, in the sense of art for art's sake, seems rather reductive and undeserving of the author. In the case of "The Secret Miracle" one cannot fail to notice the fact that the story is set in the context of the Second World War and was written and published at a time when Argentina, though formally neutral, was still siding with the Axis powers. In "The Secret Miracle" Borges explores the limits of representation and poses different methods through which to examine the Holocaust.

—Alejandro Meter