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

Heda is a fiercely intelligent and brave person. She is able to withstand decades of injustice and suffering, all while maintaining her ability to recognize and interact with beauty and kindness. She works tirelessly to support her son.

Heda’s intelligence and introspection allow her to recognize flaws in the Community Party before many others. Having lived through the Holocaust, she is wary of ideology that causes harm. Although, many others, such as her first husband Rudolf, lived through the same fate, Heda is more skeptical of the Communist Party than her first husband, Rudolf.

Heda harbors an inclination to recognize beauty in the world and her penchant for the written word (whether in her own writing, or in translating the writing of others which she believed to be her true calling) allows to examine the world thoroughly, and oftentimes decouples human society from the natural world in her memoir, thereby reinforcing the contrast between the innate good in the natural with the insidious behaviors of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party.

Rudolf is Heda’s first husband and Ivan’s father. He is a good man though idealistic, and at first believes wholeheartedly in the Communist Party, so much so that he ignores early warning signs of corruption and violence within the Party.