Hitler, Stalin and I: An Oral History
By Heda Margolius Kovály and Helena Třeštíková
Prepared for publication and translated from the Czech by Ivan Margolius
Edited by Carrie Paterson and Christopher Michno
Text © Heda Margolius Kovály and heirs, 2018
Translation © Ivan Margolius, 2018
Images courtesy of Ivan Margolius / Margolius Family Archive, except where noted. Images courtesy of Česká televize are from the documentary Hitler, Stalin a já, directed by Helena Třeštíková and produced by Česká televize, 2001.
Hitler, Stalin a já was published in Czech by Mladá fronta, Praha, 2015,
This book is an adapted film transcript of an interview with Heda Margolius Kovály by Helena Třeštíková. The interview took place in Heda’s apartment on Soukenická in Prague between August 28th and August 31st, 2000, and formed the basis of Hitler, Stalin a já, a documentary directed by Helena Třeštíková and produced by Česká televize in 2001.
Cover and book design: Jessica Fleischmann / still room
Typesetting: Jody Zellen
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Kovály, Heda, 1919-2010, author. | Třeštíková, Helena, author. | Margolius, Ivan, translator.
Title: Hitler, Stalin and I: an oral history / by Heda Margolius Kovály and Helena Třeštíková; translation by Ivan Margolius; introduction by Helena Třeštíková and Ivan Margolius.
Description: Los Angeles, CA: Dopplehouse Press, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9780997818499 (ebook) | LCCN 2017946125
Subjects: LCSH Kovály, Heda, 1919-2010. | Czechoslovakia--History--1918-1938. | Czechoslovakia--History--1938-1945. | Czechoslovakia--History--1945-1992. | Komunistická strana Československa--Purges. | Jews--Czech Republic--Prague--Biography. | Antisemitism--Czech Republic. | Czechoslovakia--Politics and government. | Prague (Czech Republic)--Biography. | Auschwitz (Concentration camp) | World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, Czechoslovakian | Trials (Political crimes and offenses)--Czechoslovakia. | Slánský, Rudolf--Trials, litigation, etc. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Classification: LCC DB2629 .K68 2018| DDC 943.7/1204/092--dc23
Los Angeles, California
Dedicated to Heda’s grandchildren and great grandchildren
as she would have undoubtedly wished
(Daniel, Susanna, Theo, Jan, Elli, Matthew, Luna, Toby)
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I THE EYEGLASS BY KUPKA
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE FIRST REPUBLIC
CHAPTER II A SMALL BLOKE IN A DIRTY TRENCH COAT
THE BEGINNINGS OF FASCISM AND THE OCCUPATION
CHAPTER III WEEDS FOR DINNER
THE TRANSPORT TO ŁÓDŹ GHETTO
CHAPTER IV A ZEST OF LIFE
LIVING IN ŁÓDŹ GHETTO
CHAPTER V A WORD OF HONOR
THE TRANSPORT TO AUSCHWITZ
CHAPTER VI COLUMNS OF FIVE INTO THE GAS CHAMBERS
AUSCHWITZ
CHAPTER VII KUDLA
THE LABOR CAMP
CHAPTER VIII NOW OR NEVER
THE DEATH MARCH
CHAPTER IX TEN LUMPS OF SUGAR
A SEARCH FOR PRAGUE REFUGE
CHAPTER X STRIPTEASE AT THE HOUSING DEPARTMENT
THE PRAGUE UPRISING
CHAPTER XI CARP ARE NOT KILLED HERE
THE POSTWAR LIFE
CHAPTER XII THE COUNTRY IN DECLINE
AFTER THE COUP, 1948
CHAPTER XIII WITHOUT A SINGLE WORD
THE TRIAL
CHAPTER XIV THE ELEVENTH INTO THE TALLY
AFTER THE EXECUTION
CHAPTER XV THE DEN IN ŽIŽKOV
LIFE IN ISOLATION
CHAPTER XVI AN ELEGANT TORCH
THE WARSAW PACT INVASION: 1968
CHAPTER XVII A LINE FOR APPLE STRUDEL
THE EXILE
CHAPTER XVIII WHAT ELSE COULD I POSSIBLY WANT?
THE END
TIMELINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
HELENA TŘEŠTÍKOVÁ
I first became acquainted with Heda Margolius Kovály during the screening of Zuzana Justman’s documentary, A Trial in Prague (2000), at Prague’s Evald Cinema. Straight away Heda enchanted me in that film with her extraordinarily direct and open minded presence. Immediately I had an idea to make a documentary film with her about her life, which was so horrendously typical of twentieth-century Central Europe, where there was no escape from global political events. Several days later I contacted her and appealed for her participation. Heda hesitated a while, but to my delight, she agreed to the proposed project.
The days I spent with her and my small crew working on that film were some of the greatest experiences of my life. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself openly to the outside world. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places – which in relation to the subject matter is especially rare. I admired her attitude and composure, even after all her extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism, the two totalitarian regimes that passed through Central Europe in the twentieth century, afflicted Heda’s life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist, and for that I respected her greatly.
We shot the film in 2000 and edited it in 2001. The final editing was carried out at the Czech Television studios in September 2001. We were working on including documentary footage of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. On the monitor we had shots of blazing buildings and smoke over Prague. We took a short break, and my film editor and I went to get coffee. A television set in the café was switched on, showing the burning towers of the World Trade Center in New York. It was September 11, 2001. I realized then that our film was very timely. Subsequent to the following world events, I feel that Heda’s story still remains very topical.
Prague, 2016
IVAN MARGOLIUS
My mother, Heda Margolius Kovály (née Bloch), was born in Prague in 1919. She spent the years of the Second World War in a ghetto, Auschwitz and other concentration camps, escaped from a death march, and took part in the Prague Uprising against the Nazis in May 1945. Following the war she worked as a graphic artist at various Prague publishing houses. In 1952 her first husband and my father, Rudolf Margolius, was convicted in the Stalinist Slánský Trial and executed. In 1955 she married Pavel Kovály. In 1968 after the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring, Heda was forced into exile in the United States. Heda returned to Prague in 1996, and she lived there until her death in 2010.
After accidently finding the transcript of the Slánský Trial buried deep in a drawer at home as a schoolboy living in Prague in 1961, I had to wait another two years for Heda to gather the courage to tell me in detail of my father’s fate. (Only very recently have I steeled myself to listen to the actual sound recording of Rudolf’s trial deposition, which differs from the prewritten text that he was forced to memorize and from the later published transcript.) I begged Heda to write the whole story down, if not for the general readership then at least for me, the future generations of our family, and our remaining distant relatives. This has also served as a measure of resistance to official narratives, as I will briefly explain. In 1963 the Communist government of Czechoslovakia published its findings into the Slánský Trial and the innocent men accused and executed, my father among them. But the assessment was distributed only to select members of the Party, not into general circulation because of worries about possible backlash. Since then, the trial has been written about in various books, but there has neither been an official declaration of innocence nor an apolo
gy by subsequent governments. My own efforts to seek a posthumous apology for my father had been thwarted even by the governments democratically elected since November 1989. Neither Presidents Václav Havel, Václav Klaus nor Miloš Zeman1 apologized to the defendants’ families, their excuses being to the effect of: “Apology can only be given by those who were guilty in construing the Trial.” This is of course an outrageous and unacceptable denial of responsibility, especially today when it is more than common for governments to publicly apologize to families and survivors of prior governments’ misdeeds. In 1968, First Secretary of the Communist Party Alexander Dubček and President Ludvík Svoboda gave medals in memoriam to some of those executed, including to my father Rudolf Margolius, but the case was never fully explained to the general public.
The front cover of the Slánský Trial transcript, Orbis, Praha, 1953.
A page of Rudolf Margolius’ false deposition construed by the Czechoslovak State Security and the Soviet advisors and then used in the Slánský Trial. The statement, which had to be learned by heart by the defendant for the court hearing, is signed and corrected by Rudolf Margolius, November 18, 1952, two days before the start of the trial.
Courtesy National Central Archive, Prague.
In the 1960s, Heda earned a living by working hard on translations mainly from English into Czech. She enjoyed this task enormously and gained great respect in Czechoslovakia for her work, establishing herself as one of the finest translators of the time. Jan Zábrana, one of her fellow translators, wrote in his diary: “Heda was really one of the best translators from English out of the ones practicing in Czechoslovakia from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. She translated intelligently, freshly, with inspiration; her translated texts possessed a flow of natural prose, they had their own special spark.”2
This busy vocation kept Heda away from other literary activities, and it was only after she left Czechoslovakia following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 to come to the United States that she had some free time to recollect her thoughts and to write her story, now known as Under a Cruel Star. Since the first Czech exile publication under the original title Na vlastní kůži [The Time at Firsthand] in 1973, it has been in continuous print by various publishing houses in several versions and under differing titles. The English translation was followed by books in Japanese, Spanish, Norwegian, German, French, Dutch, Danish, Chinese, Romanian, Italian, with more editions planned in other languages as the book’s reputation has continued to grow. The respected critic Clive James wrote: “Given thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious young student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one …”3 In 1985 Heda wrote her only work of fiction, a 1950s crime novel Nevina [Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street], which was translated by Alex Zucker and published in English in 2015. John Banville wrote of her book: “A luminous testament from a dark time, Innocence is at once a clever hommage to Raymond Chandler, and a portrait of a city – Prague – caught and held fast in a state of Kafkaesque paranoia. Only a great survivor could have written such a book.”4
Helena Třeštíková, a Czech film documentarist and bearer of a number of important film awards, approached Heda in 2000 with the idea of making a television documentary of Heda’s life. The basis of the final, almost hour-long film with the title Hitler, Stalin and I, released by Czech Television in 2001, was a four-day long interview Helena conducted with Heda and which was carried out in Heda’s apartment in Prague.
At the time when Heda wrote her life story in the early 1970s, a number of other memoirs were being published about the lives spent in the concentration camps and ghettos during the Second World War. Heda decided to focus her story more on the aftermath of the war and the beginning of Communism in Czechoslovakia in order not to overemphasize her war years’ experience, which was possibly the correct decision at that time. However, the current readers of Under a Cruel Star continue wanting to know the whole of her life story to obtain a more complete understanding of the history of Central Europe in the twentieth century through Heda’s circumstances, events surrounding her, and her unique, often poetic thinking.
This reason led me to request the transcript of the four-day interview from Helena and, with her, prepare it for book publication. In the interview, Heda starts with her parents’ lives before and during the First World War. She speaks about her youth in prewar Czechoslovakia; the 1938 Munich crisis; the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Third Reich; the Jewish transports from Prague; her experience of Łódź Ghetto, Auschwitz, Christianstadt and other camps; being in a death march and her escape to Prague; her search for a safe refuge and participation in the uprising. The story continues with her reunion with her first husband Rudolf, their constrained lives in Communist Czechoslovakia, Rudolf’s arrest, his execution and the aftermath. The interview expands on the events of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion and Heda’s subsequent journey to the United States, her exile years spent in Boston, her work at Harvard Law School Library and her eventual return to Prague in 1996. Heda also altered several names in her original memoir not to embarrass the still living persons mentioned, but in this book all the participants, where known, are referred to with their correct name.
Therefore this publication contains much more information than her original book. It captures directly and spontaneously her authentic memories. She speaks from her heart as “a great survivor” throughout the interview, describing some unimaginable and harrowing moments of her life. Helena’s questions led Heda gently to reveal more of her fate, personality and reflections, giving Heda courage to talk openly even about the very personal and intimate feelings that she would not have dared to reveal otherwise.
Heda’s acute observations of the world and its peoples still continue to be relevant today especially in the light of recent rising expressions of intolerance, hatred and acts of terrorism. Her story provides a truly perceptive personal record of the twentieth century’s turbulent history seen through firsthand experiences, which were affected directly by the major political upheavals of the times.
Bedford, 2017
1 Letter to Ivan Margolius from the Office of the President Miloš Zeman of the Czech Republic, December 18, 2013. Personal Correspondence. Margolius Family Archive.
2 Jan Zábrana, Celýživot (Torst: Praha, 2001) 597.
3 Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Moments from History and the Arts (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008) 365.
4 sohopress.com/books/innocence/; retrieved August 18, 2017.
Heda’s grandmother and father, Kateřina Blochová and Ervín Bloch, Ostředek, Bohemia, 1911; Marta Diamantová and Ervín Bloch at their wedding in Prague, July 2, 1916; Waldes Koh-i-noor model Elizabeth Coyne, rare signed photograph, 1913.
Courtesy Margolius Family Archive.
I
THE EYEGLASS BY KUPKA
THE FIRST WORLD WAR and THE FIRST REPUBLIC
HELENA TREŠTÍKOVÁ: We should endeavor to have an informal interview. Let’s sit opposite each other – you talk, and I will ask very occasional questions.
HEDA MARGOLIUS KOVÁLY: All right, so I don’t have to pretend that I’m talking to empty space, but I’m talking to someone real?
No, and you don’t have to speak like a book, but freely and naturally.
All the hardship that befell our family started during the First World War. My father’s family came from a poor farming family in Ostředek, a small village near Benešov in Central Bohemia. My father was very proud and always emphasized that the famous Czech poet Svatopluk Čech had also been born there. My father studied at a technical college in Prague. When the war broke out, he was called up to the front with a friend of his from Ostředek. They were totally inseparable, and my father used to say: “Václav and I shared everything, and so we also shared that shrapnel.” Somewhere near the Macedonian town of Skopje, then occupied by Serbia, they were both heavily wounded – my father especially badly
.
Father said that after the explosion he lost consciousness and suddenly he woke up in a very dark room; a large black-bearded figure towered over him and asked: “Religion?” Then, as well as later in the concentration camps, an Esperanto-like language developed, which was understood by all despite everyone having their own native tongue. And Father said: “A Jew.” So the man left, and Father again passed out. When he came to, another man leaned over him, but with a white beard. And he said: “If you are a Jew, say a prayer.” At that time my father was a free spirit and wasn’t very religious, but he knew the short Hebrew prayer that every Jew knows – Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad. He recited the prayer, and the man left with a satisfied expression.
At the same time his friend Václav lay in a room in another house. A different black beard appeared above him and asked for his religion, and he replied: “Catholic.” In a while a closely shaved man without a beard came and asked: “Can you say the Lord’s prayer?” He reeled off the prayer and again went to sleep. These two Muslims, that rabbi and that priest looked after those two wounded soldiers. When a search was being made for deserters, they hid them and, after a time, nursed them into such good health that they managed to walk all the way back to Prague. However, my father had a crippled arm until the end of his days.
The First World War was terrible. The soldiers fought under awful conditions. They weren’t armed adequately, and they didn’t know the reason for the conflict – for them it was a mystery. My mother showed me a pair of red Turkish slippers with turned-up points that my father brought home with him from the man who looked after him – which she treasured for the rest of her life. This shows clearly how people understood each other then and tried to help each other; it didn’t matter what nationality or religion they were. People had compassion then, which is something that died out with the First World War.
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