49 pages • 1 hour read
Heda Margolius KovályUnder a Cruel Star: A Life In Prague, 1941-1968
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Natural World
When Heda is suffering from pain and trauma inflicted by humans, she finds comfort in the natural world. Her attraction to birds, flowers, sunsets, and the forest all reveal her attachment to nature.
Heda is drawn to the movement of birds and the freedom inherent in their movements. As birds fly over the concentration camp, Heda observes their freedom and aspires to a similar freedom of her own. Though she cannot experience the freedom of the birds herself, her spirit lifts when she witnesses birds moving through the sky. Though she is imprisoned, freedom is still accessible to her by the simple act of watching the birds fly. Heda compares her positive emotions of love and hope to a timid bird. This comparison reveals that she believes her emotions, once imprisoned, have the potential to express themselves when the situation is safe.
At various moments in the memoir, Heda uses nature imagery to mark changes in her emotions. For example, the sunset in Chapter 6 symbolizes hope for the future; after the sun sets, night falls, but the darkness of night is alleviated by dawn and the arrival of a new day. Also in Chapter 6, flowers make an appearance during moments of potential celebration. Girls decorate Russian tanks with flowers when they arrive in Prague, and Heda picks flowers as she waits to find out if Rudolf will respond to her radio message.
The natural environment of the forest is important to Heda as a place of solace and safety. The forest protects Heda and her fellow escapees when they flee the concentration camp, hiding them from danger and sheltering them. She takes her son Ivan to the forest so that he too can feel the comfort of the shade and the undergrowth. Later in the memoir, when Ivan is in London and her husband Pavel is in the United States, Heda tries to escape Czechoslovakia by traveling through the forest; she is turned back at the border, but the forest remains a space of freedom for Heda—one that is literally and figuratively alive with possibility.
Springtime
In the natural world, the season of spring is a time of renewal; many important events in Heda’s life and in the country of Czechoslovakia take place during springtime, proving that springtime can symbolize renewal for the human world as well as nature.
Heda first meets Rudolf Margolius when she is twelve years old on a beautiful spring day. This auspicious meeting foreshadows their marriage—a happy union that results from a lucky connection via Heda’s radio message. Heda’s springtime meeting also foreshadows Rudolf’s idealistic character. According to Heda, Rudolf is a man of unselfish integrity; after his unjust death, she doggedly pursues documentation of his innocence, seeking to preserve his memory as a man whose life and goals befit the hope and optimism represented by the spring season.
Heda escapes the concentration camp and arrives in Prague as spring is beginning. In this case, the symbol of spring is more complex; Heda’s return to Prague means that she is closer to living her life again, but her narrow escape from the Nazis makes her return to Prague fraught with anxiety. She experiences deep disappointment when her friends turn her away, fearful for their own lives, but her strength and resilience enable her to carry on.
The uprising of 1968 also takes place in the spring. The Prague Spring, as this time in Czechoslovakian history is remembered, was a time of hope and optimism around matters of reform and freedom. Soviet troops did not leave Prague until 1991, making springtime another complex symbol in this context. For both the human and the natural world, spring is a time when anything seems possible, which explains why Heda’s hopes rise during this season at several points throughout the memoir.
