Who Is Heda Margolious Kovaly's Under A Cruel Star

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Under a Cruel Star was a touching book and was unlike anything I have read before. Heda Margolious Kovaly wrote this memoir sharing all of her first hand experiences throughout her life and told us what life was like in Czechoslovakia. The whole memoir was essentially a timeline of her life as it started from when she was a child, but particularly talks about her horrid life after her first husband, Rudolf, faced the death sentence for being associated with the Slansky scandal. Rudolf and her both joined the communist party, as they were both survivors of the concentration camps and wanted to help improve Prague. After surviving Auschwitz, losing her family and escaping from a death march you would think her hardships stopped there. Yet they continued throughout her life. It …show more content…

The memoir really exemplified how strong of a woman Kovaly is. Who was Heda Margolious Kovaly? Heda Margolious Kovaly was the main character of the whole entire memoir and was also the author. This book is her sharing her experiences and everything she encountered throughout her tough life. To start off Heda was one of the many Jews who was taken into the concentration camps with her family. Her whole family was forced to leave their home and go the Lodz Ghetto in 1941. She watched her cousin slowly suffer and die. Then her and her family were sent to Auschwitz and Heda was separated from her parents, who were then killed by the gas chambers. Heda somehow managed to escape a death march from Poland into Reich Germany, with her friend Hanka in hopes of having a better life. She was extremely lucky to escape because she was one of the estimated 10,000 survivors. Escaping was the only thing on her mind because staying in those camps was just not an option. She could not just wait for her death to come; “There is, perhaps, nothing harder than waiting passively for death.” (16). After escaping, which was extremely exhausting and

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