The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes

Born on December 19, 1942, in a Jewish labor camp in Novaky, Slovakia, Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes Hecht, were imprisoned there until their deportation to Auschwitz. Arriving at Auschwitz on November 3, 1944, Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, in the arms of her mother, was branded with a blue tattoo on her forearm as prisoner A-26959. She survived the tattooing and countless other shocks that awaited her in this concentration camp. Although liberated on January 27,...
More Description

Born on December 19, 1942, in a Jewish labor camp in Novaky, Slovakia, Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes Hecht, were imprisoned there until their deportation to Auschwitz. Arriving at Auschwitz on November 3, 1944, Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, in the arms of her mother, was branded with a blue tattoo on her forearm as prisoner A-26959. She survived the tattooing and countless other shocks that awaited her in this concentration camp. Although liberated on January 27, 1945, they remained in the Auschwitz infirmary because Eva was too sick to travel and Agnes was about to give birth to her second baby girl, Nora. In April 1945 Agnes brought her two little girls back to her home in Trencin, western Slovakia. Arriving back home, Agnes was confronted by the devastating loss of her husband, her father, mother, three siblings, the generations of grandparents and great grandparents as well as the loss of the family's fortune. But she worked hard creating a sense of normal life for her daughters. Although Eva had flare-ups of the illnesses she suffered in Auschwitz, she did well at school and went on to study medicine at the university in Bratislava. In 1966 she married a fellow survivor, Jacob Sultanik living in Munich, Germany. Eva fled Communist Czechoslovakia in 1967 and moved to West Germany to join her husband. Here she began her practice as a pediatrician and later as a psychotherapist--and for the first time had the opportunity to live out her Jewish identity. 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 together, Oliver and Julian. Every so often, the horror of her early years would resurface in nightmares of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Late in life, after her sons had grown up, Eva decided to finally tell her story. In 2016, at the age of seventy-four, and published her memoir Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erinnerungen (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag).