Heda Margolius Kovály

Early life and World War II Heda Margolius Kovály was born Hedvika Bloch In 1939, while Czechoslovakia was occupied by Nazi Germany, Hedvika Helena Bloch married her childhood sweetheart Rudolf Margolius.

In 1941, Heda Margolius and her husband together with her parents were rounded up along with the first 5,000 of the city's Jewish population and taken to the Łódź Ghetto in central Poland. Her husband was sentenced to death and then executed in December 1952. Margolius had been prevented from seeing her husband for eleven months after his arrest, and she later learned that he had been hanged and his body cremated and given to security officials for disposal. His ashes were thrown on an icy road. She raised her son Ivan in impoverished conditions, through her determination to look after them both. She survived by translating books of well-known authors into Czech and also designing dust jackets, passing them on to publishers under pseudonyms.

Later life She remarried to Pavel Kovály (1928–2006) in 1955, using his name to submit her later work.

Margolius Kovály published her autobiography Under A Cruel Star – A Life in Prague 1941–1968 in 1973. She worked as a reference assistant librarian in the Harvard Law School Library at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Margolius Kovály returned to Prague to retire with her second husband in 1996.

Writing and Media Her memoir was originally written in Czech and published in Canada under the title Na vlastní kůži by 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1973. An English translation appeared in the same year as the first part of the book The Victors and the Vanquished published by Horizon Press in New York. A British edition of the book excluded the second treatise and was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson under the title I Do Not Want To Remember in 1973.

In 1986, she re-published her memoir Under A Cruel Star – A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (published in the United Kingdom as Prague Farewell). The memoir is dedicated to her son and it has been widely translated and is available in French and English as an e-book. The memoir is also available in Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Romanian, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, Persian.

In 1985 she published a novel called Nevina (Innocence) in Czech by Index, Köln and republished in the Czech Republic in 2013 by Mladá fronta, Praha. The English translation, by Alex Zucker, was published by Soho Press, New York in June 2015. Professor Marci Shore said of the book: "Although it is crime fiction and designed to be fine reading there is a deeper philosophical point which is that there is no innocence ... To participate in the resistance is to take on the guilt of retaliation and to not participate is to take on the guilt of passivity."

Between 1958 and 1989 she translated from German or English into the Czech language over 24 works of well-known authors such as Arnold Zweig, Raymond Chandler, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Arnold Bennett, Muriel Spark, William Golding, John Steinbeck, H. G. Wells and many others.

Jan Zábrana wrote: "Heda Kovályová was truly one of the best English translators who worked in Czechoslovakia from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Her translations were clever, fresh, inspired, they had a smooth flow of prose, their own essence."

In 2000 Kovály participated in the making of Zuzana Justman's film A Trial in Prague. In 2015 Mladá fronta, Praha, published Hitler, Stalin a já: Ústní historie 20. století by Heda Kovályová and Helena Třeštíková based on the full transcript of the 2001 TV film documentary Hitler, Stalin a já.

Faces Of The Century series published online their view of Heda Margolius Kovály's life on July 31, 2026.

Death Margolius Kovály died in Prague, age 91, after a long illness.