In a review essay in the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, E. J. Graff explains why Heda Kovály's book Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 has stood the test of time.
Kovály was a prisoner at Auschwitz and lived under the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia; her keenly observed, politically astute memoir offers intimate insight into how people behave under totalitarianism, how the human mind can surrender to absolutism in the pursuit of beautiful ideals, how idealism can lead to genuine evil, and how, even after such horror, civilization can heal itself.
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