Never Say 'Never Again'

By E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted July 1, 2005.

In 1986 my favorite bookseller handed me Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, telling me I must read it. I did, and I've since given copies of it to at least a dozen people and recommended it to dozens more. I can't be alone in this. Originally published by Helen Epstein, who invented Plunkett Lake Press just to deliver this book, Under A Cruel Star became a word-of-mouth success, garnering praise from such luminaries as Anthony Lewis of The New York Times. In 1989, Penguin brought out an edition in the U.S. and U.K. The book has remained in print ever since.

In Under A Cruel Star, Heda Kovaly tells of having escaped Auschwitz during a forced march at the age of fifteen; meeting and later marrying her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius; seeing him prosecuted and killed in Czechoslovakia's first Stalinist show trial; and thus of living through two of the most barbaric episodes of a barbaric century. Kovaly's keenly observed, politically astute memoir offers intimate insight into how people behave under totalitarianism, how the human psyche can surrender to absolutism in the pursuit of beautiful ideals, how idealism can result in genuine evil (a noun I use advisedly) -- and yet how civilization can restore itself, even after such horror. Under A Cruel Star has helped me think about the motivations and distortions of a vast range of political and social movements -- McCarthyism, the Iranian revolution and its aftermath, Al Qaeda, any "radicalism" (left or right), and any movement that claims the word "liberation." Strangely enough, it has even taught me about the virtues of both skepticism and optimism.

Kovaly's memoir is not, strictly speaking, what we usually label journalism. But the essential gumshoe questions of who, what, where, when, and how have always interested me primarily as ways to answer the umbrella question: why? That's the question Kovaly pursues, with great particularity and clarity. Why did people behave as they did -- whether with cruelty or kindness, cravenness or courage? What kept a totalitarian government afloat for so long, and what brought it down? And so let me posit that Under A Cruel Star belongs to a genre I call "intimate political reportage": first-hand reporting that focuses on the personal emotions and experiences that roil behind (and ultimately create) the headlines about political turmoil. Intimate political reportage is a necessary counterpart to the kind of parachute journalism in which reporters land in a war zone and relay news about weapons, warriors, and body counts, and to the sort of insider journalism in which reporters work the capital to send back word on which political factions are up or down. These approaches need to be supplemented with reporting that shows what happened not just from the outside in, but also from the inside out.

My bookshelves are peppered with books from this genre: Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Pumla Goboda-Madikizela's A Human Being Died That Night, Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls, Anchee Min's Red Azalea, Lilian Faderman's Naked in the Promised Land, Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart, Gregory Howard Williams's Life on the Color Line. Of these, Under A Cruel Star is the most remarkable, for a variety of reasons: because Kovaly has such a keen street sense for individuals' motivations; because her writing is so precise and beautiful; and, most of all, because she conveys such a ferocious and visceral sense that an individual life is just as important -- and just as powerful -- as governments, militaries, and political might. The book begins:

Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach . . . The first force was Adolf Hitler; the second, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. They made my life a microcosm in which the history of a small country in the heart of Europe was condensed. The little bird, the third force, kept me alive to tell the story.

This opening reveals the genre's subversive, albeit rarely stated, contention: by reporting on the stubborn human heart's peculiar movements during major world events, intimate political reportage explains not just what happened, but also what could happen the next time around.

Most of us are familiar with the Holocaust's unspeakable brutalities and degradations. But imagine a former camp prisoner who could begin a reflection on the daily hour-long train trip from Auschwitz to a work site in subfreezing temperatures by stating, as Kovaly does, "I loved those trips":

The tracks crossed an area under which an entire industrial complex had been built. Clouds of steam issued out from the earth in many places; mysterious iron constructions and fantastic twisted pipes rose from the moss-covered ground of the woods. The sun was already rising and, since there was always a thick fog hugging the ground, the sun's rays broke through it and colored the mist a variety of deep pinks, an orange, gold, and blue. Out of this shimmering vapor, dark shapes of trees and bushes emerged, drifted toward us, and vanished again.

Kovaly's attention to the world's beauty, even while in hell, is so brazen as to take my breath away. Or consider an episode in which Kovaly impulsively screams at her overseer -- a business person who had paid for Auschwitz labor -- that she and the other girls could not be expected to work well while starving. Terrified, the other girls try to silence her, certain she will be shot. Instead, he pulls her aside and asks her to explain. She does, and he is visibly stunned. As she says later: "That man lived in Nazi Germany and had daily contact with a concentration camp and its inmates, yet he knew nothing. I am quite sure he did not. He had simply thought that we were convicts, sentenced by a regular court of law for proven crimes." When we ask ourselves the important question -- How can citizens let their government do such things, in their names? -- it's essential to know that the answer is, at least in part: they didn't always know.

E.J. Graff is resident scholar at Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center and a senior correspondent at The American Prospect. Reprinted from Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2005. © 2005 by Columbia Journalism Review.

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