Heda Margolius Kovály

Heda Margolius Kovály is a Czech author.

Biography

Heda Margolius Kovály was born a daughter to two Jewish parents in Prague, in the Central European country of Czechoslovakia only a decade before Nazi Germany would come to power. Heda was raised in Prague until her family was rounded up along with the rest of the city’s Jewish population and taken away to the Lodz Ghetto in central Poland in 1941.
The Lodz Ghetto was only the beginning of a very long journey through which Heda would travel in her life. She survived the ghetto, despite all the disease and starvation that surrounded her. Her father and mother also survived the Lodz Ghetto but they were separated from Heda when the Jews were taken out of the ghetto and dispersed into the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Upon arrival in Auschwitz Heda was kept alive to serve as a laborer in the work camp. When the Eastern front of the war between the Germans and the Russians approached the camp, its prisoners were evacuated. Heda and a few other girls she had become acquainted with in the camp decided that while on this pilgrimage across the cold Eastern landscape they would escape back to Prague. After arriving to the city Heda discovered that most of the people that remained in the city during the war were too scared to help her because of her Jewish ethnicity.

When the Russians finally freed Prague from Nazi control the Communist Party began to rise. Heda was married to her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius, who had survived concentration camps in Auschwitz and Dachau during the war. His experience in the concentration camps had installed in him a belief in Communism. Rudolf took a job with the government as Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade even after Heda had expressed her reservations about such a job. In 1952, Rudolf was found guilty of conspiracy during the Slánský trial and after he was put to death Heda was forced to raise their son, Ivan Margolius, alone and in impoverished conditions. For as long as the Communist Party remained in power, Heda was kept from good jobs and shunned from society. Heda did not tell Ivan the truth about what happened to his father until he was sixteen years old. Her novel, "Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968," is dedicated to him. Heda Margolius was re-married in 1955 to Pavel Kovály. Unfortunately Pavel Kovály’s name was brought down because of his association with the widow of a traitor.
Finally, in 1968 when once again Soviet Union troops invaded Prague after the Prague Spring and occupation seemed inevitable, Heda Margolius Kovály fled Czechoslovakia and made a living in Boston, Massachusetts until she returned to Prague with her husband in 1996.

References

* Margolius Kovály, Heda (1997): "Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968", New York: Holmes & Meier, ISBN 0-8419-1377-3
"Na vlastní kůži", Academia, Praha 2003
* Levy, Alan. "Ivan Margolius: Son of Conscience." The Prague Post. November 27, 2002.
* Margolius, Ivan (2006): "Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the 20th Century", Wiley. London, ISBN 0-470-02219-1
"Praha za zrcadlem: Putování 20. stoletím", Argo, Praha 2007, ISBN 978-80-7203-947-0
*cite book | author=James, Clive | title=Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts | location=New York | publisher=W. W. Norton | year=2007 | id=ISBN 0-393-06116-7

See also

* Rudolf Margolius
* Slánský trial
* Cultural Amnesia (book)

External links

* [http://www.margolius.co.uk Margolius website]