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Eva Umlauf | Jewish Book Council

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Eva Umlauf

Eva Hecht was born on Decem­ber 19, 1942, in Nov Slo­va­kia, in a labor camp for Jews. Eva and her par­ents, Imrich and Agnes, were impris­oned in this labor camp until their depor­ta­tion to Auschwitz. After arriv­ing at Auschwitz on Novem­ber 3, 1944, accom­pa­nied by her preg­nant moth­er, Eva, one month shy of her sec­ond birth­day, was brand­ed with a blue tat­too on her fore­arm as pris­on­er A‑26959. She sur­vived the tat­too­ing and count­less oth­er shocks that await­ed her in this Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp. The advanc­ing Red Army lib­er­at­ed Auschwitz on Jan­u­ary 27, 1945. Eva and Agnes remained in the camp infir­mary because Eva was too sick to trav­el and Agnes was about to give birth to her sec­ond baby girl, Nora. Short­ly after­ward, Agnes Hecht brough her two lit­tle girls back to her home in Trenčín in west­ern Slo­va­kia.
Eva grew up with a moth­er who had to sur­vive her sur­vival — Agnes was con­front­ed by the dev­as­tat­ing loss of her hus­band, her father, moth­er, three sib­lings, the gen­er­a­tions of grand­par­ents and great grand­par­ents as well as the loss of the fam­i­ly’s for­tune. But Agnes worked hard to cre­ate a sense of nor­mal life for her daugh­ters. Eva con­tin­ued to have flare-ups of the ill­ness­es she suf­fered n Auschwitz. But she did well at school and went on to study med­i­cine at the uni­ver­si­ty in Bratisla­va.
In 1966 she mar­ried a fel­low sur­vivor, Jacob Sul­tanik who reset­tled in Munich, Ger­many. Eva left the Com­mu­nist regime in Czecho­slo­va­kia in 1967 and moved to West Ger­many to join her hus­band. Here she began her prac­tice as a pedi­a­tri­cian and lat­er as a psy­chother­a­pist – and for the first time had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to live out her Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. Jakob died in a trag­ic acci­dent when their son, Erik, was a small boy. Eva lat­er mar­ried a fel­low physi­cian, Bernd Umlauf, and they had two sons togeth­er, Oliv­er and Julian. Every so often, the hor­ror of her ear­ly years would resur­face in night­mares of the Auschwitz gas cham­bers and dead babies. Hav­ing achieved promi­nence as a pedi­a­tri­cian, child ther­a­pist, and inter­na­tion­al speak­er, Eva Umlauf decid­ed to final­ly tell her sto­ry. In 2016, at the age of sev­en­ty-four, with the assis­tance of jour­nal­ist Ste­fanie Oswalt, Eva pub­lished Die Num­mer auf deinem Unter­arm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erin­nerun­gen (Hoff­mann und Campe Verlag).

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Cover of The Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes
Non­fic­tion
The Num­ber on Your Fore­arm is Blue Like Your Eyes
Eva Umlauf with Stefanie Oswalt; Shelley Frisch, trans.

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