Heda Margolius Kovály was born Heda Blochová to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where she lived and married her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius, until 1941 when her family was rounded up along with the first 5,000 of the city's Jewish population and taken to the Lodz Ghetto in central Poland. When the Jews were taken out of the ghetto and transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 she was separated from her parents and husband. After arriving at Auschwitz, she was chosen to survive - though her parents were immediately gassed - and to work as a labourer in the Christianstadt labour camp. When the Eastern Front of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union approached the camp, its prisoners were evacuated. With a few other women in the first months of 1945, she decided while on the death march to Bergen-Belsen, to escape back to Prague. After arriving in 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. The experiences of her husband at Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps had led him to become a communist. Having been asked, he took a job with the Communist government of Klement Gottwald as Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, despite his own and his wife's reservations about the position.
In 1952, her husband was found guilty of conspiracy during the notorious Slánský trial. Rudolf was one of the eleven Jews on the list of fourteen accused. Having been prevented from seeing her husband for eleven months after his arrest, and after he and the other arrested Jews gave false confessions extracted by torture, Heda later learned that he had been hanged and his body cremated and given to security officials for disposal. In a final indignity, a few miles out of Prague, the officials' limousine began to skid on the icy road and his ashes were thrown under the wheels to create traction. Related to 'a people's enemy' her life was made harder - "Heda was thrown out of her job and her apartment, and then additionally persecuted for being unemployed and homeless." 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.
Heda re-married in 1955 to Pavel Kovály. His name was brought down because of his association with her as the widow of the alleged traitor, her first husband, Rudolf Margolius. Finally in 1968, when once again Soviet Union troops invaded Prague after the Prague Spring and occupation seemed inevitable, Margolius Kovály fled Czechoslovakia to the United States.
She worked as a librarian in the Harvard Law School library at Harvard University, in Boston, Massachusetts. Margolius Kovály returned to Prague with her second husband in 1996.
Heda Margolius Kovály's memoir was originally written in Czech and published in Canada under the title 'Na vlastní kůži' by 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1973. An English translation appeared in the same year as the first part of the book 'The Victors and the Vanquished' published by Horizon Press in New York. A British edition of the book excluded the second treatise and was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson under the title 'I Do Not Want To Remember' in 1973.
In 1986, Heda re-published her memoir 'Under A Cruel Star - A Life in Prague 1941-1968' (published in the United Kingdom as 'Prague Farewell'). The memoir is dedicated to her son and it has been widely translated and is available in French and English as an e-book.
In 1985 Heda published a novel called 'Nevina' ('Innocence') in Czech by Index, Köln and re-published in the Czech Republic in 2013. In 2015 the English translation of 'Innocence' by Alex Zucker was published by Soho Press, New York.
In 2015 Heda together with Helena Třeštíková published 'Hitler, Stalin a já' (Hitler, Stalin and I) in Czech by Mladá fronta in Prague. In 2018 'Hitler, Stalin and I' was published in English by DoppelHouse Press, Los Angeles.
In Czechoslovakia and in the USA between 1958 and 1989 Heda translated from German or English into the Czech language over 24 works of well-known world authors such as Arnold Zweig, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Arnold Bennett, Muriel Spark, William Golding, John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells, Budd Schulberg, Arthur Miller and many others.
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