Marc Bloch's book Strange Defeat was written soon after the fall of France at the beginning of World War II, while Heda Margolius Kovaly's Under a Cruel Star covers the history of Czechoslovakia from World War II through 1968, showing her native land under the domination first of the Nazis and then of the Communists. The two books reflect the responses of the writers to the events taking place around them and show differing levels of awareness about these events and their meaning.
Bloch is fully aware of this role as witness to history and self-consciously notes this from the outset, identifying his particular experience as less important than the historical events taking place around him:
The account of what happened to one soldier among many is of no especial interest now when we are concerned with matters of greater moment than the details of personal adventure . . . But it is always well to have a full description of the witness in the box. . . .
Kovaly shows some of the same awareness but sees the events first in terms of how they affected her rather than how they affected the world at large, noting at the outset as she does that three forces shaped her life:
Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach.
Bloch was a soldier as the war in Europe was developing into a world-wide conflict. Bloch fought in World War I, and in 1939, when he was 53, he was again in uniform as the German threat became more and more apparent to the people of France. Both Kovaly and Bloch are Jewish, though Bloch did not practice the religion and identified himself not as a Jew but as a Frenchman first:
I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests. ...