Under a Cruel Star: A Life In Prague, 1941-1968

Heda Margolius Kovály’s memoir begins with feelings of hope and love, feelings that she compares to a shy bird. These feelings allow Heda to persevere and to share her experience. She states that “love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of [the] horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant” (5).

Standing in the way of these positive feelings are the menacing historical figures of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. In the fall of 1941, the mass deportation of Jews from Prague begins. Heda and her family are sent to Exposition Hall, which is “like a medieval madhouse” (5). There, she witnesses gravely ill people “die on the spot” (5). She is drawn to a handsome professor from Vienna, dressed in a suit, and she listens to him talk about classical literature and ancient Rome.

Two days later, Heda is sent away on a train to Lodz and then taken to the concentration camp Litzmannstadt. When she arrives, it is snowing. A few weeks later, another transport arrives to move her yet again, into “the decaying tenements already populated by close to one hundred thousand Polish Jews living in unimaginable conditions” (7).