Heda Margolius Kovaly (1919-2010) : Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968
Three forces carved the landscape of my
life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak
and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an
inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird
would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wings in rapture. Then I too
would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain
that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere
beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant.
The first force was Adolf Hitler; the
second, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. They made my life a microcosm in which the
history of as small country in the heart of Europe was condensed. The little bird,
the third force, kept me alive to tell the story... I carry the past inside me folded up like
an accordion, like a book of picture postcards that people bring home as
souvenirs from foreign cities, small and neat. But all it takes is to lift one
corner of the top card for an endless snake to escape, zigzag joined to zigzag,
the sign of the viper, and instantly all the pictures line up before my eyes.
They linger, sharpen, and a moment of that distant past gets wedged into the
works of my inner time clock. It stops, skips a beat, and loses part of the irreplaceable,
irretrievable present...
The first page of Heda Margolius Kovaly - Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968
She was born Heda Bloch to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where she lived until 1941 when her family was rounded up along with first 5,000 of the city's Jewish population and taken to the Lodz Ghetto in central Poland. Married to her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius, she was separated from her parents when the Jews were taken out of the ghetto and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. After arriving at Auschwitz, she was chosen to survive – though her parents were immediately gassed – and to work as a laborer in the Christianstadt labour camp. When the Eastern Front of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union approached the camp, its prisoners were evacuated. With a few other women in the first months of 1945, it was decided while on this journey to Bergen-Belsen, to escape back to Prague. After arriving in the city, Margolius discovered that most of the people who remained in the city during the war were too frightened by the threat of German punishment to aid an escapee from the camps.
When
Soviet forces finally freed Prague from Nazi control the Communist Party began
to rise. The experiences of her husband at Auschwitz and Dachau concentration
camps had led him to become a communist. Having been asked, he took a job with
the Communist government of Klement Gottwald as Deputy Minister of Foreign
Trade, despite his own and his wife's reservations about the position
In 1952, her husband was found guilty of conspiracy during the
notorious Slansky trial. Rudolf was one of the eleven Jews on the list of
fourteen accused. Having been prevented from seeing her husband for eleven
months after his arrest, and after he and the other arrested Jews gave false
confessions extracted by torture, Heda later learned that he had been hanged
and his body cremated and given to security officials for disposal. In a final
indignity, a few miles out of Prague, the officials’ limousine began to skid on
the icy road and his ashes were thrown under the wheels to create traction.
Related to 'a people's enemy' her life was made harder – "Heda was thrown
out of her job and her apartment, and then additionally persecuted for being
unemployed and homeless." Their son, Ivan Margolius, was raised in impoverished conditions. For
as long as the Communist Party remained in power, she was kept from good jobs
and socially shunned. She did not tell Ivan the truth about what happened to
his father until he was sixteen years old.
