I have read dozens of books about the Holocaust, and each story provides a different perspective. Particularly unique and singularly significant is Eva Umlauf’s story as she is one of the youngest Holocaust survivors. That is, she was literally born in a labor camp in Slovakia and was transported to Auschwitz at the age of two. For years, Umlauf did not consider writing her memoir because she had no conscious memories of her experience in the concentration camp, but life circumstances led her to a place that she wanted and needed to piece together her story. Umlauf ushers readers into the book in February 2014, when at 71 she suffered a heart attack, her wake-up call that time might be running out to tell her story. Umlauf noted that male narratives are too often more revered and more sought after, which, she realized, was all the more a reason to add her story the body of Holocaust literature.
Umlauf poured over archival findings, historians’ reports, and witnesses’ accounts in her research process. In crafting the book, she uses a powerful technique, imagining what her parents may have thought by posing unanswerable questions. During transport to the camps, for instance, was “Imro (her father, who did not survive) blaming himself for not having found a hiding place for his little family? Had he given any thought to escaping?” (42) She also uses graphic imagery to evoke the horror. On the trains, infants screamed in vain for water. “Mothers never stopped caressing and consoling their children even when the children had long since died of starvation in their arms” (44). Umlauf’s description of her tattooing (which she gleaned from her mother who did survive) is painful to read. Yet Eva regards her number as a part of her, like a birthmark. “It connects me to those who went through what I did” (52). Those with numbers, another survivor declared were “those chosen to live” (52)
Many of the details of her experience at Auschwitz, Umlauf unearthed by interviewing other child survivors. Eva was likely separated from her mother and part of the toddler barracks. She was “alone in the sick bay, half-starved, and deathly ill” (54). As Umlauf regales the reader with the horrors of Mengele’s experiments, she pondered: “The archive of my conscious images didn’t retain what my eyes saw. Even so, I have a growing suspicion that lies on my soul like a shadow. Could it be that I was one of those children?” (55)
After liberation, her memoir of her growing up years enlightens readers about the Cold War in Czechoslovakia and difficulties of life behind the Iron curtain. It traces Umlauf’s full and successful life through her studies to be a physician, her marriage to a fellow Holocaust survivor and his tragic death, her marriage to a fellow physician, her medical career, and her family.
It is a compelling story, not to be missed. I’m grateful to have received an advanced reader’s copy.