[1] Married to her childhood sweetheart, Rudolf Margolius, she was separated from her parents when the Jews were taken out of the Łódź ghetto on arrival to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

After arriving at Auschwitz, she was chosen to survive—though her parents were immediately gassed[1]—and to work as a laborer in the Christianstadt labour camp.

When Soviet forces finally freed Prague from Nazi control the Communist Party began to rise.

Having been asked, he took a job with the Communist government of Klement Gottwald as Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade,[3] despite his own and his wife's reservations about the position.

In a final indignity, a few miles out of Prague, the officials' limousine began to skid on the icy road and his ashes were thrown under the wheels to create traction.

[4] Related to 'a people's enemy' her life was made harder—"Heda was thrown out of her job and her apartment, and then additionally persecuted for being unemployed and homeless.

Heda protested against the Slánský trial to the Czechoslovak authorities and to the office of the Presidents of the Republic a number of times.

An English translation appeared in the same year as the first part of the book The Victors and the Vanquished published by Horizon Press in New York.

The memoir is also available in Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Romanian, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, Persian.

[10] Jan Zábrana wrote: "Heda Kovályová was truly one of the best English translators who worked in Czechoslovakia from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.