Eva Umlauf

Eva Umlauf (;

Liberation and recovery

Only by luck were Umlauf and her mother able to survive the concentration camp during their three-month imprisonment until its liberation by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. Umlauf and her mother were both malnourished with rickets and tuberculosis, and her mother was also pregnant and suffering from jaundice. Life after World War II

Career

After returning from their recovery in the High Tatras, Umlauf's family lived in Trenčín, Slovakia, where both she and her sister successfully completed their Abitur. After a heart attack in February 2014, she decided to publicly share her experiences. In March 2016, her memoir, titled Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen (The Number On Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes), was published by Hoffmann and Campe. The book was released in Slovak in 2018. The title of the book is a line of a poem that a friend of Umlauf's sent to her. This is a reference to her as a Zeitzeugin ('Contemporary Witness'), a person who is able to testify the events of a particular foregone time period.

On 30 January 2025, Umlauf reached out to Friedrich Merz in an open letter published in Süddeutsche Zeitung; writing to him "as one of the last Holocaust survivors in Germany". She warned him, amongst other things, to protect against right-wing extremism, and advised him to seek compromise with democratic parties, as otherwise enemies of democracy would be normalised. She regularly visits schools in hopes of preventing the rise of radicalisation and antisemitism, and to encourage discussing the Holocaust even though it is an upsetting topic. In December 2025, Umlauf was awarded the Bayerischer Verfassungsorden (Bavarian Constitution Order).

Selected works

– Umlauf's memoir of the Holocaust. – Umlauf is interviewed in the cited pages.

Footnotes