Mini-Review, Under a Cruel Star

Heda Margolius Kovály has a poor sense of timing, She was in Prague when the Nazis showed up; they sent her to Auschwitz. She escaped from the Nazis and came back to Prague in time for the Communist takeover; they murdered her husband. She stayed on in Prague and very nearly passed up an opportunity to leave in the 1960s. Fate has seemed to treat her more kindly since then, giving her the means and leisure to produce her extraordinary memoir (link).

When I picked it up, I took (somewhat unthinkingly) to be “another holocaust memoir.” The holocaust figures—as well it might—but only for the first 20-odd pages. Most of the rest is about her life in post-war Prague, where the personal was the political. She is reunited with her beloved Rudolph; they are married and have a son. Rudolph and Heda are full of aspirations for the future in Czechoslovakia. Already trained as a lawyer, Rudolph schools himself as an economist and involves himself in issues of national trade policy. He (and, more reluctantly, she) finds himself drawn into the web of the emerging Czech communist party, which captures the government by coup d’état in 1948. On behalf of the Communist government, Rudolph goes to Britain and negotiates a critical foreign trade agreement. For his pains he (along with 13 others) is jailed, “tried” and finally hanged, in 1952.

Heda lives on. Under circumstances not much less desperate than what she faced in Auschwitz, she struggles to survive and to raise her son. At last the government issues an apology—grudging and half-hearted, worse almost than no apology at all. In the late 1960s, Heda finds herself free to leave. In the end she does leave—but even as she goes, her departure seems almost reluctant as if, after everything that has gone before, she still finds it hard to break the faith with her country, her past, and the memory of Rudolph.

Heda’s memoir is not a work of literary art on the order of, say, the camp memories of Primo Levi, although as a human story, it is equally affecting. Its cardinal virtue is that it is the best account I’ve ever seen of how a country might “slip into communism”—even a country with a history of democracy, even 20 years after the Russian revolution.

We see it all through the eyes of young people full of hope in a time of turmoil. They believe that demoracy failed them before World War II, when their elected leaders virtually lay down before the advancing Germans. They remembered life in the camps, where the communists were often among the bravest and most decent of the prisoners. But they also find themselves in the company of two other cohorts, neither promising allies in the march to a decent future. One are the hustlers and time-servers who had learned how to survive under the Germans—“hard-faced men,” said Stanley Baldwin in a closely similar context, “who looked like they had done well out of the war” (link) Indeed, Heda seems to show more bitterness for the “hard-faced men” (and women) than she does for her SS captors in the prison camps. The SS captors were, after all, just thugs and killers. The hard-faced ones were her neighbors, acting out a drama of betrayal.

Along with the true believers and the hard-faced men, there was a third component: people of small talent and less initiative who figured that their chance for survival depended on finding their niche in an authoritarian hierarchy Put these three together and you have a formula for disaster.

Rudolph was certainly no mediocrity, nor a hard-faced man. Remarkably, he wasn’t a very good communist either. He was an enthusiastic technocrat, convinced (until it was too late) that people of good will could work together to build a better country.

The story ends, as these things go, more or less happily. Ivan grows up and achieves a career and a family (he has written his own memoir, which goes on the list [link]). Heda comes to America and works as a librarian (I learn that in her retirement, she moved back to Prague). There is even the makings of a romance, though Heda doesn’t make much of it in the memoir—but that would be Pavel Kovály, who came to her aid in the dark hours after Rudolph’s murder, and in the sacrifice of his own career, married her. But that part is for Hollywood. One of the few tiny consolations from all the horrors of the 20^th Century is the presence of these acts of memory, of witness. In distinguished company, Heda’s stands solidly on the shelf.