49 pages • 1 hour read
Heda Margolius KovályUnder a Cruel Star: A Life In Prague, 1941-1968
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Heda Margolius Kovály’s memoir begins with feelings of hope and love, feelings that she compares to a shy bird. These feelings allow Heda to persevere and to share her experience. She states that “love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of [the] horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant” (5).
Standing in the way of these positive feelings are the menacing historical figures of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. In the fall of 1941, the mass deportation of Jews from Prague begins. Heda and her family are sent to Exposition Hall, which is “like a medieval madhouse” (5). There, she witnesses gravely ill people “die on the spot” (5). She is drawn to a handsome professor from Vienna, dressed in a suit, and she listens to him talk about classical literature and ancient Rome.
Two days later, Heda is sent away on a train to Lodz and then taken to the concentration camp Litzmannstadt. When she arrives, it is snowing. A few weeks later, another transport arrives to move her yet again, into “the decaying tenements already populated by close to one hundred thousand Polish Jews living in unimaginable conditions” (7).
Heda’s family doctor happens to be on the same transport. Although the doctor is old, he spends his days roaming the ghetto helping the sick. Soon, Heda asks to help him, and they roam the narrow streets together. The two wander “from one hovel to the next, climbing thousands of stairs, often unable to offer the sick more than the comfort of a few kind words” (8).
One day, they visit a mother and her four-year-old boy. They discover that the emaciated boy is gravely ill and likely to die. Next, they visit an old man, but upon entering the dilapidated room, they discover that he is already dead, his body swarming with lice. Heda realizes that the dead man is the handsome professor from Vienna she met at Exposition Hall.
A year later, a fire burns the half-ruined building in which her family has been living. Heda enters the burning building to save her cousin Jindrisek, who is sick with tuberculosis. Heda manages to drag him outside to safety, but three weeks later, Jindrisek dies. Heda is despondent. She writes: “There is nothing more senseless, more cruel, than dying before we have become guilty of sins that might justify death” (10).
Chapter 2 Summary
In the concentration camp in late autumn, Heda and her family work in a brickyard. They are very cold, but they have only short shifts made of burlap to wear. It is forbidden to stuff scraps of paper into one’s shift to protect against the cold, but Heda does it anyway. The workdays are long: two-hour roll calls mark the beginning and the end of the day, followed by a long train ride each way, a hike, and twelve hours of “passing along bricks” (12).
On these trips, Heda becomes so cold that she “fell rather than stepped off the train” (12). Surrounded by suffering, Heda manages to enjoy looking at the rising sun, the dense fog, and the clusters of trees, finding beauty amidst brutality.
On Sundays, the prisoners stay in the camp and work. They are not fed. One day at the brickyard, they struggle to unload coal, and girls faint from a lack of food. When the boss yells at them, something in Heda snaps. She demands to be fed like a laborer if she is to be treated as one. The boss simply turns away from her.
The next morning, the boss transfers Heda to work at the kiln, to shovel coal. Shortly after this transfer, the boss sits down beside Heda and says “Tell me” (13). Heda tells him everything. She speaks “about the public executions, about hangings where the bodies were left on the gallows for weeks while we walked by” (14). She briefly talks about Auschwitz and the gas chambers, but she cannot say much. She writes: “Human speech can only express what the mind can hold. You cannot describe hammer blows that crush your brain” (14).
Heda can recount a few specific horrors, though. She tells of the brutal murder of a young girl who tried to escape. She tells him that the pregnant girls were rounded up and then never seen again. The boss is speechless. Heda believes that he was not aware of these crimes: “He had simply thought that we were convicts,” she writes, “sentenced by a regular court of law for proven crimes” (15).
Chapter 3 Summary
World War II’s Eastern Front is so close to the camp that Heda can hear the fighting. Soon, the camp is evacuated, and the prisoners are made to walk toward Germany, over frozen snow. Occasionally, the guards shoot a straggler. Heda walks next to her friend Hanka, and they plan their escape. Heda understands the idea of freedom in a new way: “I would not belong anywhere or to anything” (17).
That night, the prisoners are housed in a barn in a village. The barn’s door is locked with an ordinary padlock, and Heda uses her knife, a prized possession, to unlock the door. Heda, Hanka, and some other girls manage to escape, but one of the girls is shot in the process. A young Czech girl appears and offers them bread. The girl and her mother offer to aid Heda and her friends in their escape. They walk along the road, at first nervous and eventually bursting into laughter.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Kovály begins her memoir with the ideas of love and hope amid captivity and suffering. She uses the metaphor of a bird flying free to represent this hope. Nature imagery appears throughout the memoir, symbolizing freedom and relief from suffering in various ways. Bird symbolism reappears at the end of Chapter 3 when Heda and her friends manage to escape: “Should I be caught,” she writes, “I would be like a bird shot in flight, like the wind caught in a sail” (18). Heda’s use of nature imagery highlights her understanding of Freedom and Imprisonment as States of Mind: though she has witnessed horror and suffering, she has not lost the ability to appreciate beauty, and her mind remains free.
This hope is also evidenced by Heda’s interactions with others, as she uses indirect characterization to reveal her compassionate and resilient nature. For example, her impulse to accompany the doctor to help the sick and her courageous rescue of her cousin demonstrates her deep conviction that life is worth living. Heda’s challenging tone when she talks back to the concentration camp boss also reveals her optimism; even while she is being persecuted, she refuses to be silenced. Heda’s plan to escape also proves that her will to live has not been crushed. Even the act of recording her experience through writing is an act of bravery and strength. The Nazi regime is designed to erase her humanity, but she asserts and preserves this humanity through writing.
Despite her imprisonment and isolation, Heda never loses her intellectual curiosity. Heda’s appreciation of the beauty around her, despite her circumstances, prompts many philosophical questions about violence and the value of freedom, another theme that she explores throughout the memoir. She explores the motives of people who participate in violence, and she challenges ideas that are often viewed as objective or universal, such as freedom and beauty. Heda’s writing is proof that, wherever she goes, she brings her “little bird” of hope, humanity, and beauty with her, and through this lens, the reader comes to view the violence and horrors of World War II.
