Heda Margolius Kovály, a Czech writer and translator, was born in 1919 in Prague to Jewish parents. In 1944 she and her family were taken to Auschwitz. Her parents were immediately killed, but Heda managed to survive by getting selected for a work detail. After escaping from a transport to Bergen-Belsen, she was reunited with her husband, who had survived Dachau and become a devout Communist. In 1952, he would be tried for conspiracy and killed in a Czech jail.

UNDER A CRUEL STAR, Kovály’s memoir of her time in Auschwitz and the early years of Czechoslovak communism, was first published in 1973. It has since been published in many languages all over the world. Her crime novel, iNNOCENCE, is based in large part on her own experiences in early 1950s Prague. Kovály died in 2010 at age 91.

Books by Heda Margolius Kovály

Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street

written by Heda Margolius Kovály, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

1950s Prague is a city of numerous small terrors, of political tyranny, corruption and surveillance. There is no way of knowing whether one’s neighbor is spying for the government, or what one’s supposed friend will say under pressure to a State Security agent. But there are larger terrors, too. When a little boy is murdered at the cinema where his aunt works, the ensuing investigation sheds a little too much light on the personal lives of the cinema’s female ushers, each of whom is hiding a dark secret of her own.