Sheela Qasem Khani

News Center – The book "Under a Cruel Star" by Heda Margolius Kovály constitutes a documented testimony of a woman who lived through three pivotal historical experiences: the Nazi occupation, World War II, and then the establishment of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. This work is not limited to narrating individual suffering; it also represents a conscious attempt to resist oblivion and reclaim truth from the grip of the official narratives of power.

Heda Margolius Kovály (1919–2010) was a Czech writer and translator of Jewish origin. During World War II, she was deported to Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz, where she lost most of her family members. After the war, she returned to a world that seemed collapsed – not only in its external reality but also in her inner psychological structure.

This experience gives her narration a rare distinctiveness: it does not slide into emotional exaggeration, nor does it surrender to coldness; rather, it is based on an ethical precision in recording facts.

In this book, the woman appears not only as a victim but as a narrating and observing self – a self that, amidst violence, hunger, and loss, finds itself forced to reconstruct itself every day. Heda Kovály writes about women approaching psychological breakdown, but in the heart of this erosion, they create a form of silent and continuous resilience – a resilience not based on slogans but on the very continuation of life.

One of the most distinctive features of the book is its distance from purely ideological visions. Unlike many of her generation who thought within the frameworks of theories and political promises in the post‑war period, Heda Kovály, through her focus on daily experience and precise observation of people, arrives at a different understanding: corruption is not merely a result of concentrated power; it is also a product of fear that operates parallel to it, taking root in human relationships, in silence, and in forms of gradual adaptation.

From this perspective, the book aligns with some central ideas of various libertarian intellectual traditions, despite their differences. All affirm that liberation is not achieved simply by the transfer of power from one hand to another; it requires breaking the cycle in which fear and power reproduce each other. Her experience shows that liberation projects themselves may end up reproducing the same mechanisms of oppression unless they confront fear honestly.

In the end, "Under a Cruel Star" transcends the boundaries of personal memoirs to become a text of reflection on the relationship between power, fear, and individual responsibility. Through her insistence on remembering, the writer stands against the idea that forgetting is a condition for continuing to live. She writes: "I was never convinced by those who said that the only way to come back to life was to forget. I wanted to remember everything, to cover up nothing, to falsify nothing, to keep events exactly as they happened. I wanted to live because I was alive, not because I survived by chance."

In this sense, for Heda Kovály, narration becomes not merely a recovery of the past but an ethical and political act – an attempt to preserve truth against the erosion of time and against systems that demand survival at the price of forgetting. The book reveals how a person, starting from the experience of pain, can neither create a myth nor surrender, but open a path for vision, speech, and continuation.