What is the author's tone in Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovaly?

By any measure the book's tone is bleak—but not hopeless. The author's story begins with the Nazi holocaust, moves through slave labor at Auschwitz, and then settles down into the Soviet reign of terror during the early 1950s. The author loses literally every relation during the Nazi genocide only to find her one personal tie with the past in Rudolf Margolius, whom she marries.