Under a Cruel Star

by Helen Epstein

  When the first troops entered the town, their commander sent word that he wished to negotiate with the National Committee. Embarrassed, the chairman scratched his head. “How are we going to talk to them? Does anyone speak Polish?”

  I found I still had long-rusted scraps of Polish that I had picked up in the concentration camps some twenty-five years earlier.

  “If no one else does,” I said, “I think I can manage.”

  The Polish delegation was made up of a perfumed colonel in dress uniform, a sweaty major in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, and an adjutant who did not once open his mouth during the proceedings. We sat at a table – the three Poles on one side; four Czechs and myself on the other. The confrontation was icy.

  The Colonel began.

  “First of all, I wish to emphasize that we have not come to interfere in your internal affairs. But you have allowed your Party to slip into the hands of right wing opportunists, Zionists even, the kind of people we in Poland have managed to eradicate...”

  I translated in the juiciest terms I could find.

  “If you didn’t come here to interfere in our internal affairs, then what is it you’re doing here?” asked the chairman. “Tell us what you want and cut the preaching.”

  “We need water,” said the Colonel. “For the troops and for the trucks. Order your people to give us access to their wells and to let us draw as much water as we need.”

  The chairman threw up his hands. “I wish I could,” he said. “I know those soldiers must be thirsty and you can’t move your trucks without water. But unfortunately this is a dry area. We don’t have a drop of water to spare. Sorry.

  “Now listen to our demand: we ask you to clear the road where you’ve halted your troops. It’s the only road linking several communities and we need it cleared for deliveries of food.”

  The major pulled out a map. “Impossible,” he said. “This is a strategic location.”

  “Out of the question,” added the Colonel. “Not open to negotiation. Give us the water.”

  “We have no water,” I translated. “Clear our highway.”

  It went around in circles like that until there was no longer any need for me to translate.

  “You know what?” the Colonel said finally. “Give us the water. Then we’ll discuss your request with the rest of our comrades and inform you of our decision.”

  “Clear the road,” said the chairman. “Then we’ll discuss your request with the rest of our comrades and inform you of our decision.”

  Everyone stood up. On one side, the polished, arrogant soldiers of an occupying army; on the other, the plain, shrewd Czech villagers. How many times in Czech history have we acted out a similar confrontation?

  We won that skirmish. But, of course, it made little difference. The real battle was taking place in Moscow, where our leaders who had been kidnapped by the Soviets on the first day of the occupation were being held and subjected to all kinds of insults, threats, and other forms of maltreatment. They tried desperately to negotiate the withdrawal of the occupation armies with Brezhnev and his associates, knowing that if they were not able to hold their own, any small domestic victory would be turned against us. We would be made to pay dearly for it.

  Finally on the evening of the seventh day, the voice of Dubcek, the only man we trusted, came over the radio. It was a voice heavy with helplessness and defeat. We listened to the long pauses between his words and the barely audible sighs that told us more than the words. Darkness was settling over the lovely countryside, the homeland of despair as I drove back to Prague. Someone had whitewashed a few words onto a fence near my street.

  “Dearest Dubcek,” they read. “We understand.”

  There is little to add.

  Rudolf’s path, that I had sworn not to abandon, now led to the border. But I still could not make the decision to leave. I walked around Prague for weeks, talking to friends and strangers alike, trying to persuade myself that no one would forget and that the future would not be submission, but waiting for another opportunity. I could see that one important change had already occurred – the spell under which the Soviets had held many die-hard true believers was broken for good. There would be no more illusions, no more self-deception about the nature of Big Brother. The grim reign of ideology was over, and maybe truth in its own oblique, unpredictable way, had prevailed after all.

  At the end of September, the invaders were still sitting in full strength at the airports. I boarded a train, carrying two small suitcases and twenty dollars in my pocket.

  The train was crammed. Facing me sat two students, a young man and a girl, who were headed for Holland. We talked about books and about life, and the pretty girl kept complaining that she had left behind her new hat.

  “Don’t you think,” she kept asking, “that going into exile would be less awful if I were traveling in a beautiful new hat?”

  Later a grouchy middle-aged German tourist came into the compartment with her small daughter. The little girl stared at the three of us curiously and then asked, “Mutti, why are these people so sad?”

  Her mother snapped at her. “Don’t you know the Czechs love their country you dummy!”

  Just before we reached the forests at the border, the train stopped and stood on the tracks for a while. An ancient railway man hobbled past our car, waved his cane, and shouted gleefully up to us.

  “We have a hospital full of Russians here! We didn’t give them anything to eat and they went out to the woods to pick mushrooms and now they’re all sick! Don’t worry. We’ll get them out of here yet!”

  The train did not stop long at the border and, when it began to move, I leaned out the window as far as I could, looking back. The last thing I saw was a Russian soldier, standing guard with a fixed bayonet.

  Translator’s Afterword

  Heda was working as a librarian at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts when a mutual friend introduced us in 1984. Soon after we met, I read an early version of this memoir that Heda had written in Czech. Philosopher Erazim Kohak, whose native language was not English, had translated it in 1973 and published it together with his own work in a volume titled The Victors and the Vanquished.

  Although neither part of the book read well, I was fascinated by Heda’s story. I was then a young journalist who had already written Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, an account of how my family and other Jewish families had adapted to life after surviving Nazism. My parents, like Heda and Rudolf, were secular Prague Jews who had planned to remain in Czechoslovakia after the second world war. Unlike Heda and Rudolf, they emigrated to America and I grew up in the Czech exile community of New York City.

  My mother had become sympathetic towards the Communists during the war because, she said, the only organized resistance she witnessed in the concentration camps had come from their ranks. My father, however, thought the Communists were “Nazis in a different color uniform” and, after the putsch of February 1948, insisted on leaving Czechoslovakia.

  I grew up speaking Czech, singing Czech songs, eating Czech food and hearing the adults argue about twentieth century Czech politics. Though my parents corresponded with Czech friends throughout the Cold War, though I knew about the Slansky trials and though I had been in Prague during the Soviet invasion of 1968, I had never read a book about what life had been like for the Jews who had remained in Czechoslovakia under Stalinism. In 1984, Heda’s text gripped me in a way few other books had. I discussed my wish to work on it with her. Eventually, I persuaded her to allow me to edit and retranslate it. For many months, on Heda’s days off from the library, we worked side by side at my family’s dining room table.

  As a former translator and author in her own right (she had translated books by Zweig, Steinbeck and Chandler into Czech), Heda was a demanding colleague. She sounded out and questioned almost every sentence, edited my edits, and rewrote many parts of her book. I translated; she revised. When we could not agree, we asked
my mother for her opinion.

  My husband and I published Under A Cruel Star in 1986 under our imprint Plunkett Lake Press. We sent a copy to the late New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who devoted one of his columns to the book. “Once in a rare while,” he wrote, “we read a book that puts the urgencies of our time and ourselves in perspective, making us confront the darker realities of human nature... Mrs. Kovaly experienced the two supreme horrors of what Hannah Arendt called this terrible century. But her book is not just a personal memoir of inhumanity. In telling her story – simply, without self-pity – she illuminates some general truths of human behavior... Quietly, with cumulative force, it shows us how the totalitarian state feeds on the blindness and the weakness of man.”

  Anthony Lewis’ column of December 11, 1986 helped us sell some 6,000 copies of Under A Cruel Star from our home. We then sold the paperback rights to Penguin and then to Holmes & Meier – its current paperback publisher. It soon became a standard college text in the United States, read by students of European History, Memoir and International Relations.

  Soon there were many foreign editions. Gollancz in the UK changed the title to Prague Farewell. Critic Clive James featured Heda’s memoir in his book, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. “Given thirty second to recommend a single book that might start a serious young student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one,” he wrote. In France, Payot’s French edition, Le Premier Printemps de Prague, won Elle magazine’s Grand Prix des Lectrices in Limoges in 1992. The memoir has been translated into Dutch, German and Japanese and optioned for a feature film several times. None has been made.

  E.J. Graff, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, described what has made this book a classic: “Under A Cruel Star belongs to a genre I call ‘intimate political reportage’: first-hand reporting that focuses on the personal emotions and experiences that roil behind (and ultimately create) the headlines about political turmoil... It is remarkable because Kovaly has such a keen street sense for individuals’ motivations; because her writing is so precise and beautiful; and, most of all, because she conveys such a ferocious and visceral sense that an individual life is just as important – and just as powerful – as governments, militaries, and political might.”

  Heda’s book is unusual also in that it looks at twentieth-century history through a feminine, if not feminist, lens. Working with her sharpened my interest in women’s history and the social history of Jews in Central Europe. Inspired by our work together, I subsequently wrote Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History. Heda’s son, Ivan, to whom Under a Cruel Star is dedicated, subsequently wrote his own memoir Reflections of Prague: Journeys through the Twentieth Century.

  Heda herself stopped writing for publication. After watching the Velvet Revolution unfold from Boston in 1989, she returned to visit Prague. She moved back to her beloved city permanently in 1996.

  This edition includes 8 photographs © Ivan Margolius.

  Helen Epstein

  Lexington, Massachusetts

  August 2010

  Heda and Ivan at Prague Castle in the early 1990s.