Essay Questions

How did Kovály’s escape from the concentration camps teach her that living requires less effort than death?

For Kovály, survival was a basic instinct—deeply ingrained within her. To have simply waited for death would have been torture far beyond any that could be inflicted at a concentration camp. The will and desire to live was intrinsic for Kovály and, as such, did not require much effort. As is evidenced by her daring escape, she was brave and tenacious and unafraid of failing—even if it meant death. To have simply marched to her death without a fight or resistance, however, would have gone against Kovály’s fundamental, biological structure—she was built to fight back, to resist. As such, Kovály’s daring escape from the concentration camp provides that—for her—finding the will to live was far easier than summoning the will to die.

Kovály’s perspective on living and death are juxtaposed against our pop culture notion that dying is the easy part of our life, while living is harder. This can likely be attributed to the fact that Kovály witnessed the slow, brutality of death at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Though many of us may imagine dying as being a short, simple, isolated event, Kovály was surrounded by death that was slow and agonizing. Her fellow concentration camp prisoners did not die slowly or easily. They starved to death or rotted alive. To die would have been long and painful. As such, though modern messages of death paint dying as an easy, isolated event, Kovály’s perspective helped her to realize that living requires far more effort than dying in the ways that she witnessed.

Why did Kovály ultimately decide to emigrate to the United States with her son Ivan in 1968?

After living in fear and rejection for years and, after the execution of her first husband, Kovály had grown disenfranchised with the political upheavals and systemic prejudice of her home country; she felt alienated by her own community and culture and sought a newer, better life for her and her child. Kovály was drawn to the freedom and acceptance of the United States. She viewed the U.S. as a place of social, political, and emotional liberation and peace. Ultimately, Kovály realized that her birth country had been the source and cause of her darkest moments in life; she longed to create a different world for Ivan and saw that potential in the United States. At the time, the United States was the birthplace of hope—it harbored the American Dream. Kovály realized that she wanted to create her own version of the American Dream for both herself and for her child. She wanted to change the narrative of violence, oppression, and hatred that she had grown up with. As Kovály longed for the freedom that the United States represented, it was only logical for her to relocate there with her child in the late ‘60s.