Anglo-Australian writer Clive James, reviewing the memoir of Heda Margolius- Kovaly several years ago, wrote: “Given 30 seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century, I would choose this one.”
I met Heda, who was born Heda Bloch into a prosperous Czech-Jewish family and who died this month in Prague at 91, several times over the years. And despite all she had suffered, she remained a vivacious and incredibly resilient woman, charming, thoughtful and with a sense of fun.
After surviving Auschwitz and a death march to Bergen-Belsen, Heda arrived back in Czechoslovakia in 1945 at the home of a friend who had promised to be “an anchor” for the Jews deported from her circle. He greeted her with the words: “For God’s sake, what brings you here?” She then ventured into the countryside to visit her family’s former home (her parents were gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz), where the Czech farmer who had been allocated her confiscated property slammed the door on her with the words: “So you’ve come back? Oh no. That’s all we’ve needed.”
Heda’s first husband, Rudolf Margolius, was a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. Disgusted by fascism he joined the Communist Party and rose to become deputy minister of foreign trade. He was then murdered as part of the notorious anti- Semitic Slansky show trial which the Czechoslovak Communist Party staged in 1952 at Stalin’s instigation to hang the leading Jewish communists.
There is a Middle East connection to her story in the sense that her husband was accused of being a “Zionist agent” and of “aiding and abetting capitalist Jews trying to undermine Czechoslovak socialism.”
Of course, this was all completely without foundation.
Having been prevented from seeing her husband for 11 months after his arrest, and after he and the other 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 Rudolf Margolius’s ashes were thrown under the wheels to create traction.
HEDA’S PERSECUTION by the communist authorities continued for years
after her husband was killed on the grounds that she was “the widow of
the Zionist capitalist Jew.”
She and her four-year-old son, Ivan, were hounded by the secret police
and shunned by former friends. She moved into an unheated shack in the
mountains, where she struggled to support herself and her young child.
“Three forces carved the landscape of my life,” she wrote in the opening
lines of her memoir. “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... The first force
was Adolf Hitler; the second, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. The little
bird, the third force, kept me alive to tell the story.”
Alfred Kazin, reviewing her memoir in The New York Times, wrote: “This
is an extraordinary memoir, so heartbreaking that I have reread it for
months, unable to rise to the business of ‘reviewing’ less a book than a
life repeatedly outraged by the worst totalitarians in Europe. Yet it
is written with so much quiet respect for the minutiae of justice and
truth that one does not know where and how to specify Heda Kovaly’s
splendidness as a human being.”
She eventually managed to flee Czechoslovakia in 1968, making her way to
America where she was granted asylum and worked as a librarian at
Harvard Law School. She returned to live in Prague after the fall of
communism.
Her memoir was first published in 1973 as The Victors and the
Vanquished, and later reissued in the US under the title Under a Cruel
Star: A Life in Prague, 1941- 1968, and in Britain under the title
Prague Farewell.
Peter Brod, one of the Czech intellectuals who knew Heda well, adds that
she was also a truly outstanding translator into Czech of English
literature, particularly of Raymond Chandler, William Golding, Muriel
Spark, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Her son Ivan, who lives in London, tells me (through a mutual friend)
that “she absolutely didn’t want any funeral or ceremony of any kind”
(though there may be a memorial meeting in London at a later date).
The writer was formerly Prague correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph. www.tomgrossmedia.com