Ivan Margolius relaxes under a table umbrella in the courtyard of the French Institute on the muggiest day of June. His soft English accent and ready laugh disguise a life marked by personal tragedies that extend back before his birth. Born in Prague in 1947, Margolius entered the world in an inauspicious time and place. In his new book, Reflections of Prague, Margolius' story and that of his family combine to tell the brutal history of Czechoslovakia in the 20th century.

"At first the book was more for my benefit," Margolius says. "I needed to formalize the facts, to have them make sense to me." The facts are grim indeed. The vast majority of his family disappeared into the transports and camps of World War II. But his father and mother, Rudolf and Heda, managed to survive Auschwitz and various other levels of hell on the retreat from the ever-shifting Russian front.

The advancing Russians, self-cast as liberators, would, however, open the next chapter of terror for the surviving Margolius clan. By the time that young Ivan was 5, his father had been executed by command of the Czech's Soviet overlords, while his mother became a "nonperson," left to fend for herself and her son. In his book, Margolius' mother is an indomitable spirit who manages to weather one disaster after another. One thing she felt necessary to do was hide the facts of Rudolf's death until a time when her son could understand what had happened.

"I was told that he had died abroad," Margolius says of his father's disappearance. "It was later that I suspected that there was more to the story. Finally, my mother sat me down and told me everything."

Rudolf Margolius joined the Communist Party after the war, when he had seen how disciplined and devoted party members were in Hitler's concentration camps. Once the Soviet-backed Gottwald regime took full command of the Czechoslovak state in 1948, Rudolf began to advance into the upper reaches of the party and government. But to hold any position of power during the waning days of Stalin's tyranny was to invite trouble.

In 1952, at Moscow's behest, Gottwald was forced to stage a show trial of supposed traitors to the People's Republic. Fourteen government officials, including Rudolf Slánský, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, were tortured into making incriminating confessions and then (with the exception of three men) dragged to the gallows. Most of the men were Jewish. One of them was Rudolf Margolius.

Mute avoidance

Reflections of Prague is a son's attempt to recapture the few fleeting images that he possesses of his father before he vanished from his life. It's also a bid to finally clear the name of a man of impeccable morality and idealism, who continually found himself on the wrong side of history.

To this day, the death of Rudolf Margolius is of no concern to the democratic governments that replaced the communists, or to others in the country. When Margolius approached one of Prague's better newspapers with his story, he says he was told, "Your father was a communist. He deserved what he got."

"Obviously, my father was a bit naive after the war," Margolius says. "But he was never a hard-line communist. Slánský, of course, was a different matter." Indeed, this farce of judgement that condemned the 10 men to death is historically called the Slánský Trial, and so it has been easy for non-communist Czech governments to shrug the affair off as an internecine bloodbath.

Ivan Margolius has been confronted with nothing but mute avoidance over clearing his father's name, from former President Václav Havel on down. "Klaus wouldn't speak with me at a function at the Czech Embassy in London," Margolius recalls, then laughs. "And that was the last time I received an invitation from the embassy."

Finding himself in Cornwall as a young student when the Warsaw Pact armies rolled into Prague, Margolius stayed on in Britain, and has become both an acclaimed architect and a writer on Czech technology and architecture. The success of his first nontechnical book has been a pleasant surprise for him. "Reflections has already sold 11,000 copies in the UK," he says, "and is doing well in the U.S." The Czech publishing house Argo will release the Czech edition early next year.

There are memorable episodes throughout Reflections of Prague, many involving Ivan's spirited mother, who is still alive and living in Prague after residing in the United States for many years. One scene finds Heda smuggling an incriminating document about the Slánský Trial out of the country so that it could be published in the West.

If there's a criticism of Margolius' book, it's that as a history it suffers for the inclusion of dialogue that the writer has often invented to propel the story forward. Frequently, these inclusions have the opposite effect, as Margolius' command of dialogue is not as strong as the book's compelling narrative drive. One scene in Gottwald's office in particular reads as fact when actually, by Margolius' own admission, it is based on rumor.