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

Even when Heda is imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, in the worst conditions imaginable, she finds an imaginative freedom that grants her the courage to risk her life in pursuit of physical freedom. Starving and exhausted, she looks beyond the barbed wire to the distant horizon and sees a freedom that cannot be extinguished, reminding herself “that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of [the] horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant” (5). After escaping Auschwitz, Heda finds that many of her former friends and neighbors—though physically free—are imprisoned by fear. Terrified of the consequences should they be caught helping an escapee, they turn their backs on her. For Heda, this painful experience is an early lesson about the nature of freedom and imprisonment. For her, true freedom is a state of mind, and it is therefore possible to be free even while in prison. Conversely, it is possible to be imprisoned even while physically free, and this is what happens to those who allow ideology and fear to supersede truth and compassion in their minds.

After World War II ends and Heda marries her husband Rudolf, their household is lively with political debate, but Heda soon learns that an inflexible political ideology can be its own kind of prison.