LIFE WITH THE WOUNDS FROM AUSCHWITZ.
THE SPEECH OF AN AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR EVA UMLAUF
SURVIVOR OF AUSCHWITZ
Dr. Eva Umlauf
Dear Naomi, My Granddaughter,
I am so happy that you are here today,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Being the youngest of the Auschwitz survivors, I was asked to speak to you today, in this place, on the occasion of today’s anniversary. I am really grateful for this opportunity.
You must know that I do not want to talk like
a politician. I do not want to engage into theoretical deliberations about forgiveness, absolution and compensation. I would not also to mitigate or downplay what people did and what they went through in Auschwitz. For me, personally, such speeches carrying an appeal are too abstract and too smooth.
I consider myself to be an heiress of the feelings who works for peace …
Speaking to you today, I would like to stress that it is the human being and humanity that always matter – especially here in Auschwitz.
Our reflections refer to the empathy between individuals and contacts between them, full of mutual respect. This is the opposite of division. Divisions belong to a simplified picture of the world, which knows only:
• good and evil;
• black and white;
• worthy and unworthy of surviving.
I, however, would like to care for the communication based on the need of mutual understanding, between:
• all people, and
• all groups
Irrespectively how different from each other they might be. The wealth of humanity is made of these differences. The more differences we bring, the more diverse our communities are.
My mother went through the hell of Auschwitz as a young woman. Later on, it was hard for her, as a Jewish woman to live in a society that wanted to forget.
The example of my spirited and engaged mother shows very well what it means “to live with internal destructions from Auschwitz“ after the liberation of the camp. When almost all others living in a majority society were trying to deny the harm made to the Jewish men and women, she lived a life
• of a Jewish woman
• of a single mother with two small daughters
• without a sense of safety in a large family
• with a tremendous mental and physical trauma
• in a traumatized society
• according to the principle that “this will end someday”
• wanting to return to “normal”.
In this picture you see my mother and me – at that time still at Nováky labor camp in winter 1943 (photo no. 1).
You see a seemingly joyful woman, a devoted mother, adapted to live in the Nováky labor camp. Yet: who has experienced this themselves, knows that the wounds inflicted by persecution, violence, slavery – such as in the labor camp, and later on, in the Auschwitz death camp – are not easy to heal. Given the Nazi persecution and in the face of Auschwitz, one cannot hope that “time is a healer”.
Those who are wounded by Auschwitz know that they will forever carry deep in their heart what they went through
• no matter how much time will pass
• no matter whether they are able to talk about it or not
• no matter whether they keep their own experience to themselves or they pass it on (at least partly) to the next generation
• no matter whether they are the wounded victims or the perpetrators.
My Mum told me about this picture: “you were the beacon of life in the times of death”. And, after the liberation, our neighbors in Slovak town, when they saw us, shouted “It is a miracle that you are alive!”. As a child I was proud to be a miracle. It was only later that I understood it deeper. Today, I consider to be “a miracle” that:
• we arrived with the last transport from Sered to Auschwitz on 3.11.1944;
• they still managed to register us and tattoo the numbers;
• but the gas chambers had already been blown up to cover up the Nazi crimes against the advancing allied armies
• a stroke of luck allowed me and my parents to sneak out from death.
All other members of the family were not that lucky – apart from me and my Mum nobody survived; my sister, Nora was born shortly after the liberation, in April 1945. All my mother’s siblings were murdered.
In the picture (photo no. 2), you can see my Mum (born in 1923) as the youngest and her three siblings:
• Franzi born in 1911
• Poldi born in 1914
• Berti born in 1921
My father was separated from us after the arrival to Auschwitz. Shortly before the liberation of the camp, he was rushed in one of the death marches. As the documents have it, he was finally murdered in Melk. The death certificate said: “he died as a result of blood infection”. Now it is not possible to verify this.
In the first picture (photo no. 3), you can see my father as a child with his parents, and in the second (photo no. 4)– with my mother – this is their wedding photo. I was learned about his story not a long time ago. My mother still lived in uncertainty about his whereabouts. She assumed that he was no longer alive, but she did not know anything about the circumstances and she was obviously worried that violence was used against him.
It is a terrible thing for a survivor family of three persons that in fact we have no relatives,
• no aunts and uncles;
• no grandparents or great grandparents
• no cousins.
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