Hitler, Stalin and I

by Heda Margolius Kovály

  In January 1953 Marie brought Ivan back to me when everything was behind us, so we could at least have each other. He looked really well and sang all the time. However, he was surprised that I wore black clothes. I wore black on purpose – I dyed normal dresses black as a demonstration of my quiet defiance that I was in mourning for a good man. Ivan used to say: “Mum, why do you keep wearing black clothes? They’re horrible, and you look sad in them.” I sat next to him and told him: “It’s because your father has died.” Ivan asked: “Where’s his grave? I want to go there to plant a flower.” I said: “We can’t do that at present because his grave is long way away, in a foreign country.” He left for a while to play with his toy train but came back and said: “Mum, don’t worry I’m big enough now. I’ll look after you.”

  I only told him years later what really happened. I thought it was such a tragic event to grow up with that I waited until he was old enough to be able to understand it.

  Then you suffered with obtaining the death certificate …

  I was ill for the whole year and only managed to put myself back together after three years. My health improved slowly, but as soon as I was able to go out I decided to approach the local authorities. I wouldn’t have dared to ask directly for the death certificate but wanted to start the proceedings, so I requested to have my status altered from ‘married’ to ‘widowed’ on my identity card. First I went to the police station, and they said: “All right, show us the death certificate.” I said: “I’ve never received one.” I talked to a young police officer. He said: “Show us the court verdict.” I said: “I’ve never received the verdict; I found out about the trial from the radio, just as everybody else did.” He replied surprised: “But you have the right to get it.” At that moment an older policeman appeared, pushed the young one aside and said: “You have to apply for it. Go to the local council offices.”

  Reuter[s] News Agency, “Czech ‘Martyr’ Honoured,” The Scotsman, May 16, 1968.

  Rudolf Margolius’ death certificate, first issued on January 5, 1955.

  Courtesy Margolius Family Archive.

  I went to the local council. They told me that no death certificates had been issued for those people, and they weren’t able to give me anything. I went through so many institutions finally getting to the Central Council, and there, I encountered the first decent man who said: “Look, you appear unwell. Sit down here in the chair and stop running around. Those certificates have never been issued – when I get any news I’ll call you about how it’s progressing.” I asked him: “Is it possible that these people may still be alive? That perhaps they weren’t executed, that they deported them out of the country or into a different prison?” He said: “You know, anything is possible nowadays.”

  For two more years I lived with a tiny hope that Rudolf was perhaps still alive, that to those people who had staged the trial it struck them as too cruel to murder innocent people. I finally got the death certificate in 1955. It was very odd. His death occurred on December 3rd, 1952, and the certificate was issued in 1955. So again it was a rather unnecessary torture. Then the situation started to change slowly.

  After some time, I found out that all those executed had been cremated and their ashes taken to unknown destination. I don’t know if there was any established storage for those urns. I heard that when the state security agents transported the ashes they joked that never before had they carried so many passengers – eleven people – in one car as on that day. The car went into a skid on the icy road because of the harsh winter. They opened the sack with the ashes and spilled them on the road to provide more traction for the car.

  Heda Margolius and Pavel Kovály, Prague, February 1955.

  A selection of Heda’s translations published between 1958 and 1970.

  Courtesy Margolius Family Archive.

  XV

  THE DEN IN ŽIŽKOV

  LIFE IN ISOLATION

  How did you survive those times?

  When I was in the hospital, Ivan lived on what little money I had saved up. After Rudolf’s death I began looking for work, but it was clear that I wouldn’t get any. Wherever I tried for a job, as soon as people realized who I was, they told me they couldn’t employ me due to rigid personnel guidelines. Month after month I ran around and couldn’t find anything. Finally I applied for a job as a cleaner in a hospital, and they told me: “You can’t do this. We’re bound by strict government guidelines.” My situation was very dangerous. Those who didn’t work were classified as society’s parasites and would go to prison.

  In the end I managed to find a strange business. It was located in a cellar, and it was led by a very decent old man who wore a hat and coat at all times. Perhaps he was always cold there. He had bags of wool thread, and his employees had frames on which they knitted scarves. The employees were mainly elderly pensioners or disabled people and thus supplemented their small allowances. This income was so little that one couldn’t live only from this wage.

  Then summer came, and I decided to help on an agricultural farm to earn some money and give Ivan the opportunity to be in the countryside. Ivan had a friend in our apartment block; they played together, and the friend had a kind mother who tried to help me all through that difficult time by looking after Ivan when necessary. She was a remarkable person. Her mother had a small farmstead at Orlík on the River Vltava and needed a number of farm hands to help on the fields. She offered to accommodate us together with Ivan’s friend, and they would play while I would work on the farm.

  I worked for a fortnight. At the beginning we weeded carrots, but then the harvest started. Wagons had to be loaded, and that was hard work. Very soon I collapsed with exhaustion and had to return to Prague, where a woman doctor at the medical center said: “Good God, which doctor allowed you to work in the fields? I’ll denounce him to the authorities!” I explained that I went there by my own volition to earn some money.

  I had to stay home for a week to recover. Then I went back to the cellar, and that old man told me: “Dear lady, I dismissed you some time ago but didn’t have the heart to tell you.” So I did all that work for nothing. That was my last effort to find work. For a while I again managed to design illustrations for graphic artist friends under their name and shared the fee with them. The worst were the problems with accommodation. We lived in an apartment that we had found ourselves, and we paid the rent from our pockets. But after Rudolf died the Ministry informed me that the flat was theirs and that I had to move out, and they offered me another place. They wanted to move us out of Prague to a village called Únětice, into a small, dilapidated cottage without any utilities. It stood on a big hill and was soaked with damp. Water had to be carried in a bucket from the foot of the hill up a very steep path. That was what they offered in exchange for our Prague flat. There was no chance to earn any living there because there was no employment in the vicinity. It was an effort by the authorities to commit another murder, because no person who would wish us to remain alive would accommodate us in such a building.

  The village mayor didn’t want me there because I was a very undesirable element. I managed to persuade him to say that they couldn’t accommodate me and didn’t want me there, and that the building wasn’t suited for human habitation and was due to be demolished. That was my salvation because then they offered me a room in a dreadful shack located in the rundown Žižkov district of Prague, which enabled me to stay in town, earn some wages and keep our heads above water. It was just a stark room without any heating. Pavel Kovály pinched a small round cast iron stove and installed it with a convoluted chimney pipe snaking around the ceiling. I had to drag the coal on my back from the cellar. In summer it was just about bearable, but despite trying to keep the room clean, it was very dirty with cockroaches crawling the walls. With our neighbors, we shared a communal toilet and a water tap in the corridor, but the people who lived there were kind. They didn’t condemn me or ostracize me; on the contrary, every time we met, they greeted me politely, stopping to a
sk how I was keeping.

  At that time I lived through great isolation. I was used to being on my own from the war years when one had to forge by oneself. Here though, it was difficult to keep proper hygiene for my son, and I was still not well and often had to stay in bed. Doctors avoided me until I found a young doctor in the medical center who, acting heroically, came three times to see me in my room. He gave me some injections, and from there on I got better. But from the moment they had thrown me out of the hospital, I had received no medical treatment, and I felt very unwell. Poor Ivan, who was in his first year of school, frequently had to clean the room when he came home since I was lying in bed so much of the time. Then he had to go shopping for milk and bread. He was only six and did more work and helped me more than any other adult would have done.

  Then officials started asking what I was living on if I wasn’t employed. One woman came and said: “Since that time on the farm you haven’t worked.” I got really angry: “I’ve a rich lover, who’s keeping me.” She said: “Come on, don’t say such things. I don’t do this gladly, but I have to put something down.” I showed her the designs I had made two years before and said: “Write down that I’m a self-employed graphic artist.”

  Ivan was also in isolation because other children didn’t want to play with him. However, a father brought his son and asked if they could take Ivan to a circus. Obviously they were very decent people who wanted to show us their solidarity.

  On one hand, people were afraid of me and didn’t want to be compromised by stopping to talk with me on the street. Everyone made a detour to avoid me when they saw me. On the other hand, I didn’t want to embarrass the few friends I had; I didn’t want to hurt them. I would reward badly those people who supported me and helped me if by my actions I put them under surveillance or in any other unpleasantness. I knew that a number of our relatives and friends had been investigated, and I learned to be self-sufficient.

  Every time I felt miserable I went down to the Vltava, sat on the stairs leading down to the quay, looked at the river and the surroundings and listened to how the river hummed. After a while, I realized that I wasn’t on my own, and in this way I managed to overcome my isolation. Prague is so amazing – I think she is one of the few places in the world built to true human dimensions. All other large capitals so greatly overpower, except Prague, which is a city that truly embraces humankind. That is why Prague’s people love her so, and not only the people of Prague but also the visitors feel that sensation of belonging, the harmony with this metropolis. That was the reason that I hadn’t considered emigration. I couldn’t imagine feeling good living away from Prague.

  The second year in the Žižkov room was critical because it was very cold there, and when there was wind everything fluttered because neither the door nor the windows fitted tightly. The stove wasn’t much good either. I was sick all the time. Even Ivan was ill. Both of us were in our beds, I with a high temperature, Ivan with the flu. The room was like an icebox, with frost on the inside of windows. Pavel Kovály came in, and when he saw us he was horrified. He wrapped Ivan in a blanket and took him to our kind friend Mrs. Musilová. On his return he also wrapped me in a blanket and drove me to his mother’s tiny flat in the Prague suburb of Vysočany. Finally Ivan and I recovered sufficiently enough to return to a normal living situation.

  After several weeks, Pavel and I got married, and everything became a bit easier. I still couldn’t find any work, and the graphic design efforts couldn’t keep us alive. Pavel had an idea: “Look, you’re good at languages; why don’t you try your hand at translating?” He still worked at Rovnost publishing house, which was being merged with a larger enterprise called Svoboda. There he got to know his boss Jan Řezáč who in the meantime became the chief editor at another publisher called Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění [National Publishing of Fine Literature, Music and Art]. Pavel went to see him and bluntly announced that while he did his military service between 1951 and 1953, he had learned several languages, and he wanted to translate. As a test Řezáč gave him a chapter from Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa [The Case of Sergeant Grischa] by Arnold Zweig. I translated it and realized that this work really suited me and could become proper vocation for me. Previously I toiled with graphic design, and nothing satisfactory came out of it. And now I found that translation suited me perfectly. Pavel took the sample chapter to the publishing house, and they were very satisfied. They commissioned him to translate the whole tome.

  However, there was a problem. Pavel knew English well but very little German, definitely not enough to have personal consultations with the publisher. I realized that we had to clarify how the work would be done. I went to see Řezáč, who I had also known from the past, and told him: “Look, I’d like to translate this book, but it’ll be done under Pavel’s name. I wanted you to know that because you were so kind to give us this work, and I don’t want you to come into any trouble.” He looked at me and said: “Good of you to tell me, now go home and get on with it.” A great man. That’s how my vocation started becoming my real main solace and a source of fulfillment in my life.

  Warsaw Pact tanks invade Prague, August 1968.

  Courtesy Česká televize.

  XVI

  AN ELEGANT TORCH

  THE WARSAW PACT INVASION: 1968

  Then the year 1968 came …

  Nowadays people mainly speak contemptuously about 1968: that it wasn’t all that good. But for me it was perhaps the most fabulous time of my life. Before 1968, I pleaded for Rudolf’s rehabilitation, which was just a pitiful scandal, and then suddenly big changes started in Czechoslovakia. I first realized that change was happening when I was at a conference discussing criminal behavior in young people. It took place in a large hall with a mainly younger audience, but there were also older people there. Suddenly somebody got up and said: “Why are you talking about that? Why doesn’t someone explain how it happened that innocent people were executed?” Then other people got up and started talking about it. I couldn’t believe that people still remembered, but many were affected whose family members had been tried, or executed, or were missing or imprisoned. It wasn’t just the matter of one trial, the so called Trial of the Leadership of the Anti-State Conspiratorial Center led by Rudolf Slánský; there were many more.

  When the general thaw started, for me it was something wonderful. I threw caution to the wind, mingled with people and attended public meetings and the amazing gatherings of young people. That was something so momentous, like seeing through a mirage, how those people suddenly understood, how they managed to untangle those complicated concepts and how they envisaged a future life and a way forward.

  Bullet riddled columns on the façade of the National Museum, Wenceslas Square, Prague, 1968. Image from Panorama Films.

  Courtesy National Archives, Washington DC.

  During the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovaks carry their bloodied national flag past a burning tank in Prague. Image from “CIA Analysis of the Warsaw Pact Forces: The Importance of Clandestine Reporting.”

  Courtesy National Archives, Washington DC and Česká televize.

  I very much rooted for Alexander Dubček. Although it wasn’t possible to know all the details, what they achieved by opening a window onto the inner workings and stifling realities of Communism was unforgettable, and obviously I tried to engage myself in all the action.

  Then the occupation came. I was asleep, and at about two or three in the morning my good friend Jan Hanuš phoned and said we were being seized by Soviet aircraft and that the occupation had started. I couldn’t understand it at all. We knew there was pressure from the Soviet Union and from Walter Ulbricht of East Germany to try to scuttle our plans and that they were worried. We knew there were armies at our borders, but it wasn’t real to us. We didn’t want to believe that anything like that could ever happen. We thought they were just threats, that perhaps we might have to slow down and agree to a compromise, but none
of the people I knew then expected that they would resort to occupation.

  My first thought was that the borders would be sealed and that I wouldn’t be able to see Ivan again, who at that time lived permanently in Great Britain. While he was growing up I suggested that one day he would have to leave Czechoslovakia. Until the thaw and the Dubček era, I knew that he wouldn’t get any further than working as a manual laborer.

  Ivan was talented, but we had great problems finding him a place at high school as well as at a university later. I knew he wouldn’t have access to higher education or proper work. In 1966 he managed to get to Great Britain, and he stayed there. That was a cruel turn for me but after two years, during Dubček’s administration, I could visit him. And with the renewed Soviet threat, it would end, and I might never see him again. My husband was in the United States then, borders were open, people traveled, and he was at Harvard attending an international conference. Ivan was in Britain, and I was in Prague. I thought: “I have to go to see Ivan.”

  We had a small Fiat 600, and I jumped in it and drove to the border in South Bohemia. I left at about three or four in the morning with a tiny suitcase and around me the beautiful South Bohemian landscape, such wonderful countryside. I thought: “I managed to overcome everything here so far, and now I have to leave.”

  I drove to the border, left my car in the forest, very manly took my suitcase and set off on foot. I didn’t get further than a hundred meters, and the guards stopped me. They took me back to the car, and drove me to their barracks. They also heard the first news about the occupation, and great agitation reigned there. They were all explaining that they couldn’t let me leave because they hadn’t been given any orders from above. Those were still the Communist soldiers who, if they hadn’t received an order, were unable to make a decision, whatever was happening. They were very excited and so eagerly longed to fight that I thought: “Maybe it won’t be that bad in Czechoslovakia. Perhaps at last we shall defend ourselves. We didn’t defend ourselves against Hitler, nor against Communism; so now we’ll fight the occupation.”