It is impossible to read her book without the deepest admiration for her quiet, fierce documentation of the ordeal of the Czech people in our time. Heda Margolius Kovály’s memoir begins in Prague during World War II. Kovály's reflections on her personal experiences reveal a high degree of insight into politics, individual and institutional behavior, and the formation of attitudes."- Christian Science Monitor " should never have had to be written but since it had, we are lucky that it was done so well."-Clive James, Cultural Amnesia Heda Margolius Kovly was born Heda Blochov to Jewish parents in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where she lived and married her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius, until 1941 when her family was rounded up along with the first 5,000 of the city's Jewish population and taken to the Lodz Ghetto in central Poland. "Kovály's attention to the world’s beauty, even while in hell, is so brazen as to take my breath away."-E.J. In telling her story-simply, without self-pity- illuminates some general truths of human behavior."-Anthony Lewis, New York Times "Once in a rare while we read a book that puts the urgencies of our times and ourselves in perspective. One of the outstanding autobiographies of the century."- San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner Kovaly, a Jew, was forcibly deported to a Nazi labor camp in the early days of German occupation. "A story of the human spirit at its most indomitable. An exceptionally intimate and poignant memoir by a Czechoslovakian exile. "A tragic story told with aplomb, humor and tenderness."- Publishers Weekly
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