Under A Cruel Star A Life Prague 1941-68

With the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, Heda Kovaly, the daughter of prosperous Jews, was deported to Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and then to Auschwitz. In 1944, Kovaly made a miraculous escape. After reunited with her husband in Prague after the war, Rudolf Margolius became a deputy minister of foreign trade. But in 1952 he and 13 other government officials were tried and 11 of those hanged in one of the era's most notorious show trials. In this powerful and moving memoir, Kovaly describes her imprisonment by the Nazis during WWII and her persecution by the Communists in the 1950s - a classic account of life under totalitarianism.