Heda Margolius Kovály

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Heda Margolius Kovály in Prague, 1992

Heda Margolius Kovály (née Bloch 15 September 1919 – 5 December 2010) was a Czech author.

Biography

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Heda Bloch was born to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She lived 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.

Married to her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius, she was separated from her parents when the Jews were taken out of the ghetto and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. After arriving at Auschwitz, she was chosen to survive, though her parents were immediately gassed, and to work as a laborer in the Christianstadt labour camp. When the Eastern front of the war between Germany and Russia approached the camp, its prisoners were evacuated. With a few other women in the first months of 1945, it was decided while on this journey to Bergen-Belsen, to escape back to Prague. After arriving to the city, Margolius discovered that most of the people who remained in the city during the war were too frightened by the threat of German punishment to aid an escapee from the camps.

When Soviet forces finally freed Prague from Nazi control the Communist Party began to rise. Her husband, Rudolf Margolius, experiences at Auschwitz and Dachau had led him to becoming a Communist. Rudolf took a job with the government as Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade at the command of the Communist Party, despite his own and his wife's reservations about the position. In 1952, Margolius was found guilty of conspiracy during the Slánský trial and executed. Their son, Ivan Margolius, was raised in impoverished conditions. For as long as the Communist Party remained in power, she was kept from good jobs and socially shunned. She did not tell Ivan the truth about what happened to his father until he was sixteen years old. Her memoir, Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 is dedicated to him. Heda Margolius re-married in 1955 to Pavel Kovály. Unfortunately Pavel Kovály’s name was brought down because of his association with the widow of an alleged 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. She made a living in Boston, Massachusettsworking as a librarian in the international law library at Harvard University. She returned to Prague with her husband in 1996. She died, after long illness, on December 5, 2010 in Prague.

References

• Margolius Kovály, Heda (1997): Prague Farewell, London: Indigo, ISBN 0-575-40086-2
• 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
• Margolius Kovály, Heda (2010): Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, Plunkett Lake Press eBook
• 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
• James, Clive (2007). Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-06116-7.

See also

• Rudolf Margolius
• Ivan Margolius
• Under a Cruel Star (book)
• Slánský trial
• Cultural Amnesia (book)
• Helen Epstein

External links

• Margolius website