Heda Margolius Kovály
| Heda Margolius Kovály | |
|---|---|
Kovály in Prague, 1992.
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| Born | Heda Bloch 15 September 1919 Prague, Czechoslovakia |
| Died | 5 December 2010 (aged 91) Prague, Czech Republic |
| Occupation | Writer and translator |
| Genre | Memoirist |
Heda Margolius Kovály (15 September 1919 – 5 December 2010) was a Czech writer and translator. She survived a 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 they were treated badly. They left for the USA in 1968 when the country was invaded by the Russians. She published her biography in 1973. She and her husband did not return to her homeland until 1996.
She was born Heda Bloch to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where she lived until 1941 when her family was rounded up along with first 5,000 of the city's Jewish population and taken to the Łódź Ghetto in central Poland.
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 the Soviet Union 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 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.
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