Rudolf Margolius with his wife Heda, pre-war photograph from the family archive.
Rudolf Margolius was born in 1913 in Prague. He graduated from the Real Gymnasium in Slovenská Street, and in 1937 he was graduated from Charles University with a doctorate in law. He was not politically involved.
In 1941 he was one of the first Jews to be deported from Prague to the ghetto in Lodz, Poland. He managed to survive until the liquidation of the ghetto, when the remaining prisoners were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, and he also survived the death march ending in the Dachau camp, from where he escaped at the end of 1945. All his relatives, as well as his wife Hedy's entire family, were murdered in the death camps. His experience of Nazism had awakened in him the hope that communism would bring a better world. At the end of 1945 he joined the Communist Party as a rank-and-file member and put his abilities fully at the disposal of building a new Czechoslovakia.
From 1945-1948 he worked in the Central Union of Czechoslovak Industry, then became Chief of the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Trade and Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade. He secured very favourable trade conditions for the country, which, however, contradicted the intentions of the Soviet Union: they concerned economic cooperation with the free world. He was arrested on 10 January 1952.
During the trial of the alleged Zionist conspirators, he recited a learned lie claiming that he had spent the war in London.
He was executed on 3 December 1952. The bodies of the executed were cremated and their ashes were apparently used as grit on an icy road.
What does the fate of Rudolf Margolius have in common with the fate of Franz Kafka's two sisters?