She Beat Two Totalitarianisms

Good news — having gotten over a thoroughly vexing hump in my manuscript revision, it looks like smooth sailing for the rest of the week. I might even be able to finish the thing by tomorrow, and return to normal posting here. I have a bunch of stuff to post about the SSPX scandal, including a good letter from someone who lives in the St. Mary’s community, and who writes in defense of it.

While it was still on my mind, I wanted to commend to you all one of the best books I have ever read, period. The other night, I was reading in bed on my Kindle from Clive James’s wonderful book of profiles of important 20th century figures, called Cultural Amnesia. He wrote a short piece on a woman about whom I had heard nothing: Heda Margolius Kovaly. What a life she led! HMK was a Jew of Prague who survived the Nazi death camps, and then survived persecution by the Communists (though her husband did not; he was hanged as a traitor after a 1952 show trial).

James says that if he had one book to recommend to young people who wanted to begin to understand what 20th century politics meant, it would be HMK’s memoir, published in English as Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968. James opens his essay with these lines from her book:

A few miles out of Prague, the limousine began to slide on the icy road. The agents got out and scattered the ashes under its wheels.

James tells the story of HMK’s life. She was carried off with her family, all Jews, by the Nazis to their death camps in occupied Poland, but survived, and returned to Prague. She rediscovered her childhood sweetheart, also a survivor of the camps, and married. They both joined the Communist Party, mostly because the communists were the farthest thing from the Nazis they could find, but also, especially her husband Rudolf, because they really wanted to rebuild a more just Czechoslovakia. Rudolf Margolius became a state economic functionary, and they quickly saw what a monstrous lie communism was. In 1952, Rudolf Margolius was convicted of treason in a show trial and, along with the other so-called traitors (most of them Jews, note well), hanged. Their bodies were incinerated, and the secret police took the ashes by car to be disposed of in the country. After telling that story, Clive James directs his readers:

Now look again at the quotation above.

That was the life of Heda Margolius Kovaly: to survive the Nazi death camps, alone of her family, only to come home and live through her Jewish husband being turned to ashes by the communists, and those ashen remains used to keep the secret policemen’s sedan from getting stuck on an icy road.

Needless to say, I bought HMK’s memoir on Kindle at once, and sat up till three a.m. reading it. I finished it the next day. It was impossible to put down. The Czech communist state punished her and her son Ivan as family members of a traitor, by making them live in wretched poverty. She remarried a friend, Pavel Kovaly, and he too suffered for his connection to them. HMK kept fighting the state bitterly to exonerate her husband’s memory. She finally succeeded (the state admitted that all of the convicted had been truly innocent), but my God, what a story. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, she and her family fled for good.

Aside from the sheer human drama of this book — what a film it would make! — there is what HMK tells us about ideology and inhumanity. I had read in Anne Applebaum’s history of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, and had picked up in some of my own interviews, that the countries that came under Soviet occupation weren’t uniformly against the communists. Aside from having a fair number of true-believing communists in their population, there was the fact that the peoples of Eastern Europe were broken and exhausted from the Nazi occupation and the war, and eager to believe anything that promised them a better future.

I didn’t really understand that, deep down, until reading HMK’s memoir. If I had endured what she did at the hands of the Nazis, you’d better believe I would be eager to embrace the most anti-Nazi party I could find. And if I had lived through all that destruction and cruelty, I would be desperate for hope in anything that promised renewal. I defy any of you to read HMK’s book and say that you wouldn’t have been susceptible to the same deception. HMK is hard on herself and Rudolf for falling for what the communists had to say, and in being so, she offers a gripping portrait of how idealism can blind a man. She writes:

When the war finally ended, our joy soon changed into a sense of anticlimax and a yearning to fill the void that this intensity of expectation and exertion of will had left behind. A strong sense of solidarity had evolved in the concentration camps, the idea that one individual’s fate was in every way tied to the fate of the group, whether that meant the group of one’s fellow prisoners, the whole nation, or even all of humanity. For many people, the desire for material goods largely disappeared. As much as we longed for the comforts of life, for good food, clothing, and homes, it was clear to us that these things were secondary, and that our happiness and the meaning of our lives lay elsewhere. I remember how some of our fellow citizens for whom the war years had been a time of acquisition and hoarding, stared when we did not try to retrieve stolen property, to apply for restitution, to seek inheritances from relatives. This was true not only of Rudolf and myself but of any number of people who had come to identify their own well-being with the common good and who, rather logically, ended up in the most ideologically alluring political party–that of the Communists. The years of imprisonment had yet another paradoxical effect. Although we continually hoped for freedom, our concept of freedom had changed. Shut up behind barbed wire, robbed of all rights including the right to live, we had stopped regarding freedom as something natural and self-evident. Gradually, the idea of freedom as birthright became blurred.

And she warns:

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

More:

I have often thought that many of our people turned to Communism not so much in revolt against the existing political system, but out of sheer despair over human nature which showed itself at its very worst after the war. Since it is impossible for man to give up on mankind, they blame the social order in which they live; they condemn the human condition.

By the mid-1940s, at war’s end, it was possible to know something about the cruelties of Stalinism. The Margoliuses and their fellow idealists thought it wouldn’t be that way in their own land — that the problem with Stalinism was Russia, not Stalinism:

In Czechoslovakia, it would all be different. We would not be building socialism in a backward society under conditions of imperialist intervention and inner turmoil, but at peace, in an industrially advanced country, with an intelligent, well-educated population. We would leap over a whole epoch. Still, I did not feel like getting involved in politics. I kept saying to myself, “All I want is an ordinary, quiet life.” But I came to realize that a quiet, simple life is neither ordinary nor easily attained. In order to be able to live and work in peace, to raise children, to enjoy the small and great joys life can offer, you must not only find the right partner, choose the right occupation, respect the laws of your country and your own conscience but, most importantly, you must have a solid social foundation on which to build such a life. You have to live in a social system with whose fundamental principles you agree, under a government you can trust. You cannot build a happy private life in a corrupt society anymore than you can build a house in a muddy ditch. You have to lay a foundation first. Rudolf used to laugh and say, “I never thought you’d be one of those people who’re neither hot or cold. If you sit on the fence now, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!”

The Margoliuses discovered that they had believed in a lie. She reflects:

What I remember most vividly from this period following the coup is a feeling of bewilderment, of groping in the dark that was doubly oppressive because the darkness was not only outside but inside me as well. How could we have been so credulous? so ignorant? It seems that once you decide to believe, your faith becomes more precious than truth, more real than reality.

Yes, that is so. It is so not only for communists, but for all true believers. In that line, I recognize people who refused to believe that their own children were being sexually assaulted by clerics, because believing in the Church was more precious than truth, more real than reality. It is absolutely critical for us to recognize that this isn’t just something that befalls communists, or Catholics, or any other distinct group. This is something that could befall any human being, in any time. This is Heda Margolius Kovaly’s testimony. It is the testimony of the 20th century. Solzhenitsyn told us that the world deceives itself if it thinks what happened in Russia cannot happen anywhere. It can! It can, because human beings are always desperate for hope, and meaning, and always desperate to believe in something.

One more thing from HMK’s book, about a fellow menial worker who helped HMK when she was sick and poor and an enemy of the state:

She was young and pretty and she accepted life with all its trials cheerfully, like a bird in the sky. She was yet another proof to me that nothing limits a person more than what was then called “a clearly-defined world view.” The people who, in my experience, proved most astute and dependable in a crisis were always those who professed the simplest ideology: love of life. Not only did they possess an instinctive ability to protect themselves from danger but they were often willing to help others as a matter of course, without ulterior motives or any heroic posturing.

Now, I’m going back to finishing my own manuscript. It will have been improved by the insights and experiences of this extraordinary woman, Heda Bloch Margolius Kovaly, targeted for destruction by two totalitarianisms, but victorious in the end. Read all about her victory, which is a victory for the human spirit, in her memoir. She died in 2010, at the age of 91, but may her memory be eternal.

If you’d like to hear the voice of this great lady, watch this video interview of her from 1988:

Here, at The Other Europe, are some other archived interviews from the late 1980s, with members of the anti-communist opposition, who had no idea at the time that Communism was about to fall.

The post She Beat Two Totalitarianisms appeared first on The American Conservative.