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.
Of Jewish ancestry, she spent the years of the Second World War in the Łódź Ghetto and then in concentration camps Auschwitz and Gross Rosen sub-camps including Christianstad.
In the wake of her husband's trial, Kovály became a social pariah, barely able to survive and stay out of imprisonment as few would hire her for work, as at that time unemployment was illegal under the Czechoslovak constitution.
San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner called Kovály's memoir "a story of human spirit at its most indomitable … one of the outstanding autobiographies of the century."
Josef Škvorecký, a fellow Czech writer and expatriate, stated that the book was "written with the sophistication of a litterateur and the immediacy of a survivor."