Prague as a Symbol
Throughout her memoir, Heda Margolius personifies the city of Prague to the extent that she blurs the citizens of the urban space with the space in and of itself. The effect is that Prague acts both as city and symbol. As she writes, "Prague is not an aggregate of buildings where people are born, work, and die. She is alive, sad, and brave, and when she smiles with spring, her smile glistens like a tear". The feminine pronoun, "her", is pertinent here; Heda relates her own experience, one of hardship and trauma, with the traumatic experience of the city and its populous itself. Prague thus jitters between urban historical site and a symbol for human suffering and resilience.
Motifs of Light and Darkness
Heda Margolius Kovály regularly uses the symbols of light and darkness in a way that verges on the oxymoronic. The memoir is replete with phrases that discuss the deafening quality of silence, a silence that is connected with darkness and the absence of light. The writing quality is almost one of synaesthesia - the concentration camps and the traumatic experiences she experiences blur the sense: light is associated with cheerful noise, whereas dark is associated with a paradoxically loud silence.
Trains as Symbols
In the memoir, trains represent a predestination that, in the context of the holocaust, represents hardship and suffering. Kovaly regularly deploys the symbol of the train as a stark reminder of what went on during Nazi occupied Prague. The trains of the present serve as a haunting symbolic reminder of the horrors of the past. We as readers, much like passengers on a train, are temporally forced to shuttle back and forth from a trauma that is still ongoing and still in the process of healing.
Symbols of Luxury
Throughout the memoir, Kovaly uses symbols of luxury to serve as a gross contrast to the evils of the concentration camps: those in charge both of the Nazi and Communist regimes lead lavish lives, at the expense of the suffering masses. The effect is almost Orwellian, and it has the effect of pairing up the totalitarian nature of these regimes: regimes that are ostensibly on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Through such symbols, Kovaly shows the mistreatment of concentration camp survivors even after liberation.
Blurring of the dead and the living
The ghosts of the dead haunt Kovaly's narrative - they threaten to seep into the lives of the living. Additionally the living - the survivors - are at times presented as a living dead. These survivors are still fresh from trauma, unable to move on from the horrors they experienced. Through this motif of blurring descriptions of the living and dead, Kovaly is able to emphasis the evils of both the Fascist and Communist rule. Both regimes are ones that dehumanize people to the extent that even the boundaries of what is alive and what is not are forced to blur.
