Eva Heyman

Eva Heyman (; 13 February 1931 – 17 October 1944) was a Jewish girl from Oradea. She began keeping a diary in 1944 during the German occupation of Hungary. Published under the name The Diary of Eva Heyman, her diary has been compared to The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. She discusses the extreme deterioration of the circumstances the Jewish community faced in the city, offering a detailed account of the increasingly restrictive anti-Jewish laws, the psychological anguish and despair, the loss of their rights and liberties and the confiscation of property they endured. Heyman was 13 years old when she and her grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust.

In May 2019, the Eva Stories project was launched, visually depicting extracts from her diary on Instagram. On International Holocaust Day 2020 (27 January), Eva Stories was also launched on Snapchat.

Biography Heyman started writing her diary on her thirteenth birthday 13 February 1944 (the same year Germany occupied Hungary). The town in which she was born has been called Nagyvárad by Hungarians and Oradea by Romanians. In 1931, the year she was born, it was part of Romania; in her diary, Heyman calls it "Varad", short for Nagyvárad, a colloquial name widely used. The city was part of Hungary at that time.

Diary and publication

Heyman's diary was published first in Hungarian. It was first translated into Hebrew by Yad Vashem in 1964, then into English by Moshe M. Kohn. The English edition was published by Yad Vashem in 1974.

In her diary she talks about her 13th birthday party, the last before she is murdered at Auschwitz. She writes of a pleasant party with tea, sandwiches, and a type of chocolate cake called Sachertorte. She is given a navy blue knit dress, a light tan spring coat and for the first time two pairs of sheer stockings. She also received an assortment of books, music-disc recordings, candies, and oranges. In 2017, a theater show entitled Eva Heyman: Anne Frank of Transylvania was staged in Romania based on Eva's story. In 2021, Teatrul Regina Maria in Oradea staged a theatre show based on Eva's story; the dramatization, concept and direction was done by the actor Emil Sauciuc and Ioana-Maria Repciuc, the actress who also plays Eva's role in the show.

Eva Stories In May 2019, a series of short videos that illustrate her story was uploaded to Instagram in the style that characterizes the media, under the title Eva Stories. The videos went viral and attracted worldwide interest. During the 2020 World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, world leaders planned to post Eva-related online messages in order to popularize the project and help combat anti-Semitism. On International Holocaust Day, 27 January 2020, Eva Stories was also launched on Snapchat.