Summary Of Under A Cruel Star By Modris Eksteins

Within the past few centuries, there have been many groups of people that are seen as estranged and are thus alienated from the rest of society. These people draw on their own history and past experiences to form the foundation for their actions in an attempt to insert themselves into the status quo. As a result, these actions have unexpected, and often dire, consequences. Calamitous consequences are observed in Germany during World War I and II and Czechoslovakia post-World War II as chronicled by Modris Eksteins in Rites of Spring and Heda Margolius Kovály in Under a Cruel Star respectively. Using past experiences as the basis for a group of peoples actions in order to overthrow the current social order results in the establishment of a

After the Nazi occupation was driven out, many people “believed more than ever before that every individual should aim to contribute to the common good” (58). However, this goal, this belief cannot be achieved under the same system, capitalism, that fell victim to the Nazi regime. Thus a different government must be adopted, communism. Communism, at surface level, represented everything that survivors of the concentration camps came to be believe in, such as self-sacrifice, unity, and patriotism. Once this form of government was implemented however, those aforementioned values became its downfall and therefore essentially replicated the Nazi occupation. High ranking officials in the communist party were “concentrated so intensely on his own limited work, they lost perspective and any genuine understanding of the real needs and wishes of the people” (87). Citizens and loyal follower of the Party one by one became imprisoned due to treason. Most of these citizens were Jewish, indicating that much more than the craving for national wholeness rubbed off on the people of Czechoslovakia during German occupation; anti-Semitism was still a very real reality. The Party, like the Nazis, blamed the Jews for infiltrating and corrupting the Party. As a result, they were painted as the common enemy and subjected to cruel treatment and punishment. It was as if the Nazis never left. Thus in an attempt to create a society where people acted for the common good and fought for and earned their freedom, the people of Czechoslovakia cloaked the ideals of Nazism in a veil, called it communism, and set it as their