Under a Cruel Star: A Life In Prague, 1941-1968

“It seems to me, sometimes, when people say that everything passes, that they don’t know what they are saying. The real past is what Jindrisek was thinking as he lay there in his corner on the floor and watched me walk out into the sun and the cold. It is what went through my mother’s mind as she sang ‘Where is my home?’ to her dying nephew behind barbed wire in the Lodz Ghetto. The real past is enclosed in itself and leaves no memory behind.”

Readers are presented with the idea that to know the entirety of another person’s life is virtually impossible. There are portions of scenes that one can witness, and then there are the invisible and internal aspects of that scene.

“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.”

The intense power of ideology to manipulate a person’s moral compass is explored repeatedly throughout this text. Both the Nazis and Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party ply their citizens with lies until their citizens are unaware of actual truths.

“I did not say much about Auschwitz. Human speech can only express what the mind can hold. You cannot describe hammer blows that crush your brain.”

Heda expresses her belief that language can express only a fraction of lived experience, especially when that experience is traumatic. While one can report observations, attempts to convey the experience in words inevitably fall short.