Heda's Memoir: Analysis

This is Heda’s memoir. Heda is a woman who lived in Prague and she was a Jewish woman as well. In her memoir, she talks about concentration camp and how cruel it was. Germany invading their country, Poland, made an outbreak of World War II. Communism controls the majority of the people and it is a social and economic system. Heda thought communism was acceptable and it was a life style that many people wanted, but was it really? Everyone thought that communism would solve everyone’s problems and that everyone would be equal.

“Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world…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.” (p. 5) Heda being forced to go to concentration camp, she had a miserable life. Freedom was not given to her or anyone. Life in the concentration camps was not the best because no one had clothing. The clothing itself were short shifts made of burlap. That is all. Having to work in a brickyard, far away from the camp, on cold autumn days, it was not easy. “Our value sank beneath the level of cattle, because even cattle had to be fed. In Auschwitz, Jews became nothing more than pieces of junk that were burned in bulk in the incinerator.” (p. 65) Jews were treated poorly. Everyone knew that. But why did Jews let them happen to them? Why did Heda become a communist after all of this happened? Heda knew that this was her life and she was being compared to junk. “Maybe the Jews by very existence had helped the Nazis to power more than anything else.” (p. 65) The Nazis had control over everyone and everything. It was not attractive. But why did the Nazis do this? Why was this a normal thing back then? Why did Hitler do this? Hitler himself just wanted power. He wanted to be a legend and this was how he was going to do it. He wanted others to be traumatized by what he had done to them. Everything was taken away from the Jewish. Freedom of Speech, family, friends, belongings and they lost themselves through out it.
“People no longer aspired toward things but away from them.

All they wanted was to avoid trouble. They tried not to be seen anywhere, not talk to anyone, not to attract attention. Their greatest satisfaction would be that nothing happened…” (p. 126) Heda and her inmates in Auschwitz escaped and Heda fled back to Prague. She was embarrassed that no one would take her in because of what happened to her. How sad. Friends would not take her in because she was humiliated and worn out. “The Nazis had always portrayed the Soviet Union as their most dangerous enemy. Eventually we came to believe that communism was the very opposite of Nazism, a movement that would restore all the values that Nazism had destroyed, most of all the dignity of man and the solidarity of all human beings. It came to seem that only another revolution could undo what the first had done.” (p. 65) Communism helped people get through their life on the daily. It was a way of having everything together in one place even if it was an attraction for those who were not communist. Heda later on when she escaped the concentration camp, she went door to door to her friend’s house but no one recognized her. She was not the same Heda that she used to be. Communism affected every individual. “It’s all because people have given up expecting anything good from this government.” Said Mrs. Machova. “Our government has no intention of taking care of us. It only harasses us.” (p. 106) The government did care. Why would the

government spend all this time on people they did not care about? Torture and fear was involved, but they would have not wasted their time on them if they did not really care.
“I hesitated for a long time before I decided to sign the application for Party membership.

I knew I would have trouble with discipline…I wanted to work, to study, to have a baby, to catch up on everything the war years had deprived me of.” (p. 67) Heda knew from that point on that communism seemed to be okay. She joined a communist party and so did her husband. Long after they joined the communist party, her husband got arrested in 1951. After that, Rudolf, her husband, was executed. Heda’s life changed drastically after that. “Don’t worry. Every word you tell us will be heard by the Comrade General Secretary.” (p. 170) She learned that she could not trust anyone, except herself. Heda knew that once she joined the communist party, they would control her and her actions and that seemed true. Communism controlling her made her seem like that she had her life together. “The communist-even the Jews who were Communist-were in a vastly better psychological state.” (p. 65) That is why Heda wanted to become a communist. Not because Rudolf was a communist, but because she was a Jew and the torture would stop, not all at once, but slowly. Heda thought it was the right thing to

do.
Heda thought she would have a great life with her husband and son, but that soon flipped around. From her going to Auschwitz to her husband being arrested and executed, Heda’s life changed. “After Rudolf’s death, I spent several weeks lying in my bed as though it were a coffin…rumor had it that I had been kidnapped together with my child taken abroad, that I was in jail, that I had committed suicide. The truth was that there was not much life left in me.” (p. 148) Heda was gone. Communism ruined her eventually. It was not the right or wrong thing to become a communist, but Heda should have done it because she wanted to. Not because it promised her a better life, because that did not happen. She will never be able to overcome what happened to her and her life. Heda is a powerful individual. She went through hell and back with her country and her life. Everything she had ever loved was ripped away from her heart and will never come back.
Word Count: 1080