The Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes - A Memoir

Beautifully translated by Shelley Frisch, The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes is a poignant and riveting memoir that sets a family story in historical context and brings psychological insight to bear on accounts of emotional trauma. 
Having achieved prominence as a pediatrician, child therapist, and international speaker, Eva finally decided to tell her story. In 2016, at the age of seventy-four, with the assistance of journalist Stefanie Oswalt, Eva Umlauf published Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erinnerungen (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag).
As someone who has endured the effects of the Holocaust from infancy, she writes, I wish for all that has happened to be understood and processed from diverse perspectives so that personal suffering, societal ruptures, and brutal transgenerational traumas can be prevented from being passed on to future generations.” This book draws on years of interviews, copious correspondence, archival research in Europe and Israel, trips to labor and concentration camps, and the author’s personal recollections.

On November 3, 1944, a toddler named Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, was branded prisoner A-26959 in Auschwitz. She fainted in her mother’s arms but survived the tattooing and countless other shocks. Eva Hecht was born on December 19, 1942, in Novaky, Slovakia, a labor camp for Jews. Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes, were imprisoned in this camp until their deportation to Auschwitz. A month prior to their arrival there, several thousand mothers and their children had been gassed. Now that the Red Army was rapidly advancing in Poland, the murders stopped. Agnes, then pregnant with her second daughter, and Eva were still alive when the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Her father was transferred to Melk, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and died there in March 1945. 
In late April, Nora, Eva’s sister, was born. Agnes Hecht remained in the camp infirmary until her two little girls were well enough to travel, then brought them back to her home in Trenčín in western Slovakia. Eva grew up with a mother who had to “survive her survival”—the little family lived with the loss in the Holocaust of the husband/father, the mother’s three siblings, and the grandparents and great-grandparents. Having also lost her family’s fortune, Agnes worked hard to create a normal home life for her daughters. 
Like many survivors in the post-Holocaust era, Eva’s mother never talked about her experiences. Eva suffered frequent flare-ups of the illnesses she had suffered in Auschwitz. She did well at school and went on to study medicine in Bratislava. In 1966 she married Jakob Sultanik, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had resettled in Munich, Germany. Eva left the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1967 to join him in West Germany. There she began her practice as a pediatrician and later as a psychotherapist—and for the first time she had the opportunity to live out her Jewish identity. Unfortunately, Eva's husband, 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, Oliver and Julian. Every so often, the horrors of Eva's early years would resurface in nightmares involving dead babies and Auschwitz gas chambers. 

List of contents

Table of Contents

the witness                  Poem by Ján Karšai

Foreword                    Professor Michael Brenner

Chapter 1                    The Heart Attack                                            February 2014

Chapter 2                    Birth in Nováky                                              December 1942

Chapter 3                    Arrival in Auschwitz                                      November 1944

Chapter 4                    The Sledding Accident                                   February 1947

Chapter 5                    Under the Red Dictatorship                            November 1952

Chapter 6                    The Wedding: Starting Anew                         July 1966

Chapter 7                    Jakob’s Death                                                 April 1971

Chapter 8                    Julian’s Birth and the Return of the Trauma December 1985

Chapter 9                    The Auschwitz Speech                                   January 2011

Afterword                   Naomi Umlauf: A Granddaughter's Reflections

Notes

Bibliography

Photo credits

Acknowledgments

Translator’s Note 

About the author

Author: Eva Umlauf. Although branded for life in Auschwitz at two years old, Eva Umlauf survived and returned to Trenčín after the war. She studied medicine in Bratislava and specialized in pediatrics. In 1966 she married and moved to Munich the following year. After the death of her first husband, she worked as a clinic doctor. She later remarried and ran a pediatric practice. She is the mother of three sons. Today she still works as a psychotherapist. In 2011 she first spoke at a commemoration ceremony in Auschwitz, and since then she has been involved as a contemporary witness in international conferences and many research projects.

Assistant Author: Stefanie Oswalt. After earning her doctorate in Jewish Studies in Potsdam, Stefanie Oswalt worked as a freelance journalist for Deutschland Radio and as an author in Berlin. Most recently, she published Ari Means Lion (with Ari Rath, Zsolnay Verlag, 2012).

Translator: Shelley Frisch. Shelley Frisch holds a doctorate in German from Princeton University. She taught at Columbia University and Haverford College, where she chaired the German Department, before turning to translation full-time in the 1990s. Her translations from German, including biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and Franz Kafka, as well as other works of fiction and nonfiction, have been awarded numerous translation prizes, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Foreword: Michael Brenner. Michael Brenner is the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies and director of American University’s Center for Israel Studies. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He is the author of nine books, including After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany and Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. In addition, he co-authored the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times—for which he was awarded a National Jewish Book Award—and edited nineteen books.

Afterword: Naomi Umlauf. Naomi Umlauf, who is Eva Umlauf’s granddaughter and a student at Brown University, discusses the impact of the Holocaust legacy on her family and her own future as a third-generation survivor. 

Summary

Beautifully translated by Shelley Frisch, The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes is a poignant and riveting memoir that sets a family story in historical context and brings psychological insight to bear on accounts of emotional trauma. 
Having achieved prominence as a pediatrician, child therapist, and international speaker, Eva finally decided to tell her story. In 2016, at the age of seventy-four, with the assistance of journalist Stefanie Oswalt, Eva Umlauf published Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erinnerungen (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag).
As someone who has endured the effects of the Holocaust from infancy, she writes, I wish for all that has happened to be understood and processed from diverse perspectives so that personal suffering, societal ruptures, and brutal transgenerational traumas can be prevented from being passed on to future generations.” This book draws on years of interviews, copious correspondence, archival research in Europe and Israel, trips to labor and concentration camps, and the author’s personal recollections.

On November 3, 1944, a toddler named Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, was branded prisoner A-26959 in Auschwitz. She fainted in her mother’s arms but survived the tattooing and countless other shocks. Eva Hecht was born on December 19, 1942, in Novaky, Slovakia, a labor camp for Jews. Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes, were imprisoned in this camp until their deportation to Auschwitz. A month prior to their arrival there, several thousand mothers and their children had been gassed. Now that the Red Army was rapidly advancing in Poland, the murders stopped. Agnes, then pregnant with her second daughter, and Eva were still alive when the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Her father was transferred to Melk, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and died there in March 1945. 
In late April, Nora, Eva’s sister, was born. Agnes Hecht remained in the camp infirmary until her two little girls were well enough to travel, then brought them back to her home in Trenčín in western Slovakia. Eva grew up with a mother who had to “survive her survival”—the little family lived with the loss in the Holocaust of the husband/father, the mother’s three siblings, and the grandparents and great-grandparents. Having also lost her family’s fortune, Agnes worked hard to create a normal home life for her daughters. 
Like many survivors in the post-Holocaust era, Eva’s mother never talked about her experiences. Eva suffered frequent flare-ups of the illnesses she had suffered in Auschwitz. She did well at school and went on to study medicine in Bratislava. In 1966 she married Jakob Sultanik, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had resettled in Munich, Germany. Eva left the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1967 to join him in West Germany. There she began her practice as a pediatrician and later as a psychotherapist—and for the first time she had the opportunity to live out her Jewish identity. Unfortunately, Eva's husband, 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, Oliver and Julian. Every so often, the horrors of Eva's early years would resurface in nightmares involving dead babies and Auschwitz gas chambers. 

Foreword

From the Foreword by Professor Michael Brenner

“If you want to live, leave your children” was the advice that the prisoners assigned to work at the unloading ramp in Auschwitz gave to the new arrivals. Agnes Hecht ignored these words when she entered this antechamber of hell from a labor camp in Slovakia on November 3, 1944. She held her almost-two-year-old daughter, Eva, when the number A-26959 was burned onto the child’s forearm. The Auschwitz system had already begun to disintegrate in the fall of 1944, but the survival of someone so young was still highly unlikely. The Nazis usually delayed the murder only of those individuals who were able to work for the war effort, which meant young and healthy men and, to a lesser degree, women. Children and older people were most often sent to the gas chambers immediately.

The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes is not the usual Holocaust survivor story. Eva Umlauf, née Hecht, has no conscious memories of her experiences in Auschwitz as a toddler; nor did her mother tell her much about their time there. Her memoir reconstructs those early experiences and explains how they have shaped her life since then.

Historian Saul Friedländer, ten years older than Umlauf, titled his memoir of childhood as a survivor in France “When Memory Comes.” But for Eva Umlauf, who was so young when the war ended, memory did not come. Seventy years later she pieced together her early history from archival findings, historians’ accounts, and witness reports. 

As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, stories like hers are the last ones we will hear. They are no less important for history than the stories of those who can draw on conscious memories. In fact, few acts reveal the deep abyss of human depravity more clearly than the burning of a tattoo into the arm—and thus the psyche—of a tiny child who was supposed to die.

This book also provides an account of Cold War history in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and ’60s, detailing numerous events largely forgotten today. Eva Umlauf takes us to the Slánský trial with its antisemitic undertones, to the threats of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, and to the complexities of crossing the Iron Curtain into West Germany—in her case to marry a Holocaust survivor living in Munich. 

As a psychotherapist, Umlauf knows how to interpret the many twists and turns of human behavior. Through that lens she reveals what it was like to live in the shadow of the Holocaust, under Communism, and in an emerging Germany. Her story will surprise even those who think they know everything about the Holocaust.

Product details

• Authors: Eva Umlauf, Umlauf Eva
• Assisted by: Brenner Michael (Foreword), Umlauf Naomi (Afterword), Shelley Frisch (Translation), Frisch Shelley (Translation)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: ages 18 to 99
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 07.05.2024
• EAN: 9781942134961
• ISBN: 978-1-942134-96-1
• No. of pages: 220
• Dimensions: 150 mm x 225 mm x 158 mm
• Weight: 354 g
• Assisted by: Stefanie Oswalt
• Illustrations: Black & White spread through the book
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Genocide & War Crimes, Memoirs, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century, Autobiography: historical, political & military, Fascism & Nazism, Genocide & ethnic cleansing, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Memoir, Survivor