Under a Cruel Star

Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 was published first under this title by Plunkett Lake Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986. The memoir was written by Heda Margolius Kovály and translated with Franci and Helen Epstein. It is now available in a Holmes & Meier, New York 1997 edition (ISBN ), in a Plunkett Lake Press 2010 eBook edition and in a Granta, London 2012 edition (ISBN ). Prague Farewell was the book title in the UK in previous editions. The memoir was originally written in Czech and published in Canada under the title Na vlastní kůži by 68 Publishers, a well-known publishing house for Czech expatriates, 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. The book is also available in Chinese (ISBN ), Danish (ISBN ), Dutch (ISBN ), French (ISBN ), German (ISBN ), Romanian (ISBN ), Spanish (ISBN ) and the original Czech editions (ISBN ).

Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was born in Prague. Of Jewish ancestry, she spent the years of the Second World War in the Łódź Ghetto and then in concentration camps Auschwitz and Gross Rosen sub-camps including Christianstad. After her camp was evacuated, she escaped from a death march and made her way back to Prague, where many of her friends refused to take her in due to the Nazis' harsh punishments for those sheltering camp escapees. Kovály took part in the Prague uprising against the Nazis in May 1945. The only member of her family to survive the war was her husband, Rudolf Margolius.

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