Prague Farewell

by Heda Margolius Kovály

“A Jew in Czechoslovakia under the Nazis, Kovaly spent the war years in the Lodz ghetto and several concentration camps, losing her family and barely surviving herself. Returning to Prague at the end of the war, she married an old friend, a bright, enthusiastic young Jewish economist named Rudolf Margolius, who saw the country’s only hope for the future in the Communist Party. Thereafter, Rudolf became deputy minister for foreign trade. For a time, the Margoliuses lived like royalty, albeit reluctantly, but then, in a replay of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, Rudolf and others, mostly of Jewish background, were arrested and hung in the infamous Slansky Trial of 1952. Kovaly’s memoir of these years that end with her emigration to the West after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 are a tragic story told with aplomb, humor and tenderness. The reader alternately laughs and cries as Kovaly describes her mother being sent to death by Dr. Mengele, Czech Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald drunk at a reception, the last sight of her husband, the feverish happiness of the Prague Spring. Highly recommended.” – Publishers Weekly

Genres: History, Memoir, Autobiography, Jewish, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Heda Margolius Kovály was a Czech writer and translator. She survived the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz where her parents died. She later escaped whilst being marched to Bergen-Belsen to find that no one would take her in. Her husband was made a deputy minister in Czechoslovakia and he was then hanged as a traitor. As the wife of disgraced man she married again and she and her husband were treated badly. They left for the US in 1968 when the country was invaded by the Warsaw Pact countries. She published her biography in 1973. She and her husband did not return to her homeland until 1996.

Reviews

[Nooilforpacifists]

Among the most powerful memoirs ever written, by a Czech Jewish girl snatched to a Polish Concentration camp, who then escapes near the end of the war to her native Prague, joins the Communist party, and marries a senior official in Czechoslovakia's post-coup 1949 Communist government. She lives through circumstances as trying as I've every read (though this is neither a holocaust nor an atrocity book--the violence is kept off-screen). But it's all the more powerful for that reason--a normal person in a world gone mad. And one who is a poetic writer; Kovaly's opening paragraph:

"Three forces carved the landscape of of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or so above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wings. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant."

Much of the book is on the lure of Marxism, and its corresponding failures: "Our democracy had allowed this growth of the fascist and Nazi parties which had in the end destroyed it. . . People who are ready to sacrifice their own well-being for some lofty goal are likely to expect a similar sacrifice from others who are not so willing. . . .The Nazis had always portrayed the Soviet Union as their most dangerous enemy. Eventually, we came to believe that Communism was the very opposite of Nazism, a movement that would restore all the values that Nazism had destroyed."

Soon enough, her husband becomes a political prisoner and Kovaly's brief post-war idyl turns into something like "Darkness at Noon"--the aftermath. The tale of the limousine ride (which she discovers two years after the event) is especially powerful.

A must read.

[Geraldine]

I've finished this already - extremely moving. I'm on a bit of a Czech reading kick at the moment following my little trip to Prague and this book brought back to me my love of history - I studied Czech and Polish history as part of my degree. i think anyone would find this book interesting though as a document of 20th century Europe.

[Anne]

Where to start. At the simplest level Heda Kovaly writes about living as an unwanted citizen under two brutal regimes in Czechoslovakia. At its most complicated Kovaly clearly describes and explains the fear, the insecurity, the brutality, the thieving, the envy, the spying, the collaboration to secure a place or get ahead, that thrives under totalitarian regimes.
First came the Nazis and then the Communists. Under the former she survived cruelty in labour camps and concentration camps and forced marches. Under the latter her husband was murdered during the notorious Slansky show trials in the early 1950s, after which she and her son were hounded by the authorities in the hopes they would die.
During both periods of horror her acute skills of observation allowed her to take note of frightened populations who shunned her at minimum and denounced her and tried to deny her medical care and food. Her descriptions of institutionalised evil in the form of bureaucratic panels who violate laws that aren't meant to be followed, citizens who steal, who relish the opportunity to denounce those out of favour are horrifying in their clarity. The scenes of the cynical bureaucrats trying to buy her off in 1963 and soothe their sense of guilt when the government finally confessed to having murdered innocent, hard-working government leaders and fellow party members and imprisoned tens of thousands of others are particularly insightful and frightening.
This book doesn't present academic theories about evil. It demonstrates the worst of human behavior on a daily basis in a society under siege, written with great skill and command of language by someone who survived and built a life and could still see the good in many people.

[Jessie]

An outstanding memoir from a woman who was born in one the unluckiest places at one of the unluckiest times in history.

Heda Margolius Kovaly escaped a death march in 1945 and returned to her hometown of Prague, still under Nazi occupation. Many of her friends and all of her relatives had also been taken to the camps, and those friends who had remained in Prague were mostly too terrified to help her. The hopelessness she felt upon her return, having nowhere to go and no one to turn to, was infuriating - but her friends’ actions unfortunately make complete sense considering what the Nazis did to Lidice.

Kovaly’s childhood love, Rudolf Margolius, also survived the Holocaust, and the two reunited and married in Prague after the war ended. Her husband became a Deputy Minister in the Communist government that subsequently took power in Czechoslovakia, so Kovaly was both an observer and an insider of life under Soviet Communism. She describes one official reception for the Ministers: “As usual, the vodka was running in streams, and toasts were made to the health of a large number of people who would have served humanity best by not having been born.”

Rudolf Margolius was murdered by the Communist regime in 1952, having been falsely accused as a traitor. From there, Kovaly’s life becomes unbearable, but she somehow maintains her dignity, intelligence and will to live. The memoir ends with her escape from Czechoslovakia following the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968.

[Marshall Mabry]

My first review on Goodreads, this is simply such an impactful book I just had to recommend it. Well written, captivating, and horrifying. To read this book is to get a first hand account of a nation having escaped brutal, inhuman totalitarianism in the form of the Nazi regime, and then to watch shell-shocked as it slips back into the same evil in a new form. It’s easy to ask “How could anyone let this happen?” I read this book immediately after finishing Erik Larson’s -In the Garden of Beasts- and together they provide a frightening look into the nature of institutionalized evil. It’s insidious, cancerous. Read this book. And watch.

[Robbie]

‘Truth alone does not prevail. When it clashes with power, truth often loses. It prevails only when people are strong enough to defend it.’

Nazism bad, communism bad.

[Stephen Coates]

When the Nazi's annexed Czechoslovakia, Kovály ended up in Auschwitz but when they were being marched back to Germany as the Soviet army advanced, she and a few other prisoners managed to escape and make their way back to Prague. She then found herself shunned by former friends there because she was Jewish. Thing were looking up when she reunited with her husband who had also survived the war and when he was appointed a government minister, but a few years he and others were arrested, put on show trial and executed. Years later, he was "rehabilitated".

In common with Primo Levi's "If this is a Man" and Nadezhda Mandelstam's "Hope Against Hope", "Farewell Prague" (also published as "Under a Cruel Star") does not attempt to describe or quantify the Nazi or Soviet governments, the holocaust, the gulags, the show trials in totality, each is the account of one person's experience, in her case under first the Nazis then under the Soviets and as with the other two, it's an account of survival in the face of a system thankfully I and my family and friends will never experience. This book was one of many I read having read about Kovály in Clive James's "Cultural Amnesia" and is highly recommended.

[Rod]

This was an autobiographical account of her wartime experiences and, as importantly, her experiences in a post-war communist society. This is not a horrific or disturbing book, but it is a very engaging personal account, full of hope.

[Jaroslav]

absolutely stunning

[Lysergius]

Heda survived the the Nazi KZ only to have her husband arrested, tried and executed by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.