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

Heda Margolius Kovály

1973

Two months after liberation, people had stopped cheering and embracing. They were not giving away food and clothing anymore, but selling it on the black market. Those who had compromised their integrity during the Occupation now began to calculate and plan, to watch and spy on each other, to cover their tracks, eager to secure the property they had…

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Creator Bio

Heda Margolius Kovály

1919–2010

Born Heda Bloch in Prague, Heda Margolius Kovály was shaped by her experiences of the Holocaust and communism. Interned during the war in the Łódź ghetto, Margolius Kovály survived Auschwitz and a forced march to Bergen-Belsen, during which she and a few other women escaped back to Prague. Her husband Rudolf Margolius was executed in 1952 during the notorious antisemitic Slánský trial. Left with a young son to support, she married Pavel Kovály in 1955, and the family fled to the United States in 1968. Settling in Boston, Margolius Kovály took a position at the Harvard Law Library and became an accomplished writer.

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