Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968

Rating:
Summary: Under A Cruel Star
Review: I had to read 'Under a Cruel Star' for a history class I'm taking, and I wasn't pleased about it at all. However, once I read the first page of this narrative account of a Jewish Woman's experience in Prague during and after WWII I was mesmerized, I didn't put the book down until I finished 3 hours later.

This is a fantastic book both for people wanting to learn something about the surviving the Holocaust and re-building life afterwards, and for someone who wants to become emotionally invested in a strong, interesting character.

The story tells of Heda's experiences from the year 1941, when she was taken from her home and sent to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and later to Auschwitz, to the year 1968 when Russia invades Czechoslovakia. In between Heda escapes from Nazi persecution, arrives back home to Prague to friends less than friendly, helps liberate Prague from Germany, marries, raises a child, experiences 1984-like governmental opression, is fired from job after job for having the name Margolius, and in the end survives to tell her tale.

The is a great novel that I would higly recomend to anyone interested in the Holocaust, Communism society, or just wants a good story of a woman faced with hardship who manages to survive.

Rating:
Summary: Why Communism appealed to so many after WW2
Review: Kovaly writes with precision and a welcome lack of sentimentality about the attractions for East-Central Europeans to communism after the war, especially for Jews who had survived fascism. In the first half of this memoir, she avoids the overly and sadly familiar vignettes of camp inmates to instead explore in detail the unfamiliar story of what happens to an escapee from the death camp who wanders back to Prague, while the Nazis still rule the city.

Her scenes of homelessness and fear, as her former friends often become terrified at seeing her alive and sheltering her from the Germans, reveal a fresh persective on a refugee who ironically seems to be more endangered outside Auschwitz than if she had stayed within the lager. After the war, she shows how the Jews returning to their homes found their possessions and livelihoods stolen, and how many of their fellow Czechs had brazenly or surreptitiously commandeered the houses and the property for themselves, since the Jews could do little to regain these items.

Kovaly then explains how the appeal to a more just system, rather than the beleaguered democracy that tried to revive postwar Czechoslovakia, began to fool idealistic Czechs into supporting a communism based more on the lies of those who dared not tell the truth of Stalinism, as well as those who genuinely sought--as her first husband Rudolf Margolius--to bring about a better world through Marxism on more of a Titoist model.

Many pages that follow could serve as a primer for exposing how communist dreams began to replace harsh reality for many Czechs. In incisive prose, with well-chosen metaphors and vignettes, she excels in comparing her own search to that of her husband and his fellow believers. This gradual conversion, she finds, could not be based on the facts, since these were hidden from the "masses," but doomed the Czechs to repeat the failures of Soviets, who pretended that no prejudice or nationalism tarnished the record of their CCCP--an inspiration for Czechs weakened by the Nazis, the camps, and only two decades of fragile post-WWI uneasy peace under an attempt at humane democracy. Their self-confidence beaten down, they were ripe for the idealism and self-sacrifice that communism promised.

Also, she notes, the servile, the opportunists, and the conniving rose quickly in a system that rewarded the disciple, often an incompetent member of the "proletariat" over qualified managers and leaders. She shows in the next quarter of the book how her husband was forced to become a foreign minister, and how quickly the climate shifted and led to his show (Slansky) trial and execution. Then, the pace shifts for the last section into a quick leap forward to 1968, and evocative descriptions of the "Prague Spring" and her eventual flight to the West at last.

Readers who select Ivan Klima's novels of Czech life before and after communist dictatorship, Sandor Marai's "Memoir of Hungary, 1944-48," or Gyorgy Faludy's account of prison in Stalin-era Hungary "My Happy Days in Hell" will appreciate this memoir.

P.S. It appears in earlier translation as part of "The Victors and the Vanquished" or "I Do Not Want to Remember" in 1973 versions. I cannot determine if "Prague Farewell" is another title for this work, or another volume of Kovaly's recollections.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing story of perseverence
Review: This is the best book I have read on the experience of the wartime generation in Central Europe. The author escapes from Auschewitz and marries Rudolf Margolius, a fellow Holocaust survivor, after the war. Like many disillusioned Czechs, they join the Communist Party in the hope of creating a future where such horrors could never happen again. Rudolf becomes a high-ranking technocrat in the government, and for a brief time the family lives in reasonable comfort. Tragically, they learn the Party is just setting them up for persecution, poverty, hardship and, for Heda and her son, eventual exile. They are the lucky ones.

Reading this book should rid you of any illusions you have about the Communists and help you to understand the Orwellian world of the 1950s Soviet Bloc.