Eva Heyman

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Eva Heyman

Éva Heyman (born February 13, 1931 in Oradea ( Nagyvárad in Hungarian ; Yiddish and German Großwardein ), Romania ; died October 17, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a thirteen-year-old Hungarian schoolgirl who spent a short time during the time of the persecution of the Jews in Hungary diary wrote before in the Auschwitz deported was, where victims of the Holocaust was.  

Life

Éva grew up in Oradea, which has belonged to Romania since 1919 as a result of the First World War and the changes in territory due to the Treaty of Trianon . Her mother Ágnes Rácz had been divorced since 1933, had remarried and lived with Éva's stepfather, the writer Béla Zsolt , in Budapest . Éva had stayed with her mother's parents in Oradea and went to school there. She also saw her father Béla Heyman, who was an architect and lived on the other side of town, only sporadically. In the household of the Jewish grandparents, who ran a pharmacy in the city, there was a Hungarian domestic help, Mariska Szabo, who was not Jewish. In 1942 Béla Zsolt was drafted into forced labor , but Ágnes was able to release him from forced labor. When the bombing war hit Budapest in early 1944, both moved to the supposedly safer Nagyvárad to live with their parents and daughter.

Persecution of Jews in Hungary during World War II

Nagyvárad became Hungarian again in 1940 through the Second Vienna Arbitration . As early as the summer of 1941 there was a deportation in Nagyvárad of those Jews who had no Hungarian ID from before 1919 or who were stateless in Romania. They were driven into occupied Ukraine by the Hungarians together with 14,000 stateless Jews from the Carpathian Ukraine and killed there by the Germans in the Kamenets-Podolsk massacre , which could not be concealed. In her diary, Éva repeatedly remembers her school friend Márta, whose family belonged to these deportees, who she suspects is not only dead, but that she was violently killed.

In the spring of 1944, the German, Romanian and Hungarian troops were expelled from the Soviet Union and the German Wehrmacht occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944 . This led to a new persecution of Jews in Hungary, in which the Eichmann Command in cooperation with the Hungarian authorities, the Hungarian militia and looking away from the Hungarian population from April 27, 1944 to July 11, 1944, according to the German Ambassador Edmund Veesenmayer deported 437,402 Hungarian Jews in 147 trains from the Hungarian provinces to Auschwitz.

Persecution of Jews in Nagyvárad in 1944

On March 31, 1944, German SS forces came to Nagyvárad, confiscated the city's Jewish hospital and blackmailed the head of the Jewish community, Sándor Leitner, into handing over various goods. The terror began on April 6th when SS men forcibly cleared individual houses for their needs. On April 18, members of the Hungarian Honvéd Army also began to use Jewish property.

On April 30, there was a meeting in Nagyvárad of the Hungarian State Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior László Endre (1895-1946), the municipal administration and SS-Obersturmführer Theodor Dannecker . Mayor Dr. István Soos refused to attend and resigned from his position. On May 3, 1944, city director László Gyapay ordered two ghettos for 27,000 and 8,000 Jews in the city area, which the Jewish population had to move into within five days. A Judenrat under the direction of Leitner was ordered, a Jewish security service and an infirmary. Lieutenant Colonel Gendarmerie Jenő Peterffy led these measures and contributed to the worsening of the disastrous situation from May 10th when he ordered his troops of police and gendarmerie to search for valuables, the gendarmes did not shy away from torturing the Jews. “There Jews were stripped and beaten with hoses; Women were inserted power cables into the uterus, often in front of their family members. ”2,500 men were used to perform more severe forced labor. In the meantime the railroad transport had been organized. Between May 24 and June 3, the ghettos in Nagyvárad were evacuated and 3,000 Jews were deported "to the east" by train every day.

"I want to live!"

“I was thirteen - I was born on a Friday the thirteenth”. Éva begins the (published) diary on her thirteenth birthday, on Sunday, February 13, 1944. The diary registers the threatening atmosphere in February, mid-March, the German takeover and the change of government in Budapest in the words of the pharmacist Rezső Rácz in the distant provincial town, the creeping in of violence and its horrors, the deportation in April. Éva doesn't like to give her red bike, which the whole family had saved for, but she keeps her greatest treasure, her life. Éva speculates if she can save her life if she lets one of the guards kiss her. Éva's grandparents have to give up their apartment and are forced into a completely overcrowded Jewish house at 20 Szacsat Ut. Éva describes the family's move to the ghetto. It describes the need there, the sheer terror. She describes the fear for her life. The last entry is from the beginning of June 1944. When the domestic help Mariska sneaks into the ghetto to bring some groceries for the family, she receives the diary for safekeeping. On May 29th, they were announced that they would be relocated "to the East".

On June 6, 1944, the day of the Allied invasion of Normandy, Éva was deported to Auschwitz with her grandparents in one of the cattle cars. While the grandparents there immediately on the ramp to the gas chamber selected were Éva subject was the human experiments of the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele . When her feet swelled up, she was also of no value as a test subject and was gassed. She died on October 17, 1944 at the age of thirteen.

Survivors

Nothing is known about the fate of Éva's father, Béla Heyman. During the days of the deportation, the stepfather, Béla Zsolt, hid as a sick person in the sick bay of the Nagyvárad ghetto. Some of the sick, including Éva's mother Ágnes Zsolt, were not deported, but ended up in the group of around 1670 Hungarian Jews for whom Rudolf Kasztner tried to negotiate a different arrangement with Adolf Eichmann . In fact, they were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of June 1944 and from there reached Switzerland at the beginning of December 1944 .

Béla Zsolt wrote the autobiographical novel Nine Suitcase about his time in persecution, published in 1946. He died seriously ill in Budapest in 1949, his mother Ágnes became mentally ill and died of suicide in a sanatorium in 1951 .

Grave of Agnes Rácz and Béla Zsolt in Budapest on Kozma utcai izraelita temető

Diary: Edition history - authenticity question

The foreword to the Hebrew edition of the diary contained a cautious assessment by Yehudah Marton, which was also adopted in the English version: The diary stayed in Oradea in 1944 and came back into the hands of mother Ágnes Zsolt after the end of the war , who took it with her to Budapest. The manuscript has disappeared. The diary was probably edited: shortened and possibly linguistically revised. The writer Zsolt may also have edited. Due to the open language, critical remarks about the daughter's suspected multiple “betrayals” by the mother and stepfather may have been deleted.

Ágnes Zsolt published her version in 1947/1948. Translations were made into Hebrew in 1964 and initially from Hebrew into English in 1974. The Romanian writer Oliver Lustig obtained a Romanian translation in 1991. A translation into German was done by Ernõ Zeltner: Ágnes Zsolt: Das Rote Fahrrad. Nischen Verlag, Vienna 2012.

Gergely Kunt put 2010 before a new reading that the text as a literary attempt to lament asked the mother for her daughter, but the answer as unsolvable, has left to the reader.

Dissemination of the diary in Germany

The German lawyer Christoph Gann, who in 1999 presented a study on Raoul Wallenberg , who rescued the Jews from Sweden and Budapest and who has been organizing a traveling exhibition in Wallenberg since 1994, has self-translated excerpts of the diary read as part of this exhibition, most recently in Dortmund in 2011 by the actor Claus Dieter Clausnitzer .

Edits

In 1989, Krisztina Deák filmed her mother's fate under the title Eszterkönyv (German: "Esters (day) book"). A piros bicikli ( Eng . "The Red Bicycle") is a Hungarian theater production in which, in addition to Éva Heymans, the diary of Lilli Ecséry, who is three years older from Budapest, is staged.

Editions and translations of the diary

Ágnes Zsolt: The red bike 2012

Hungarian original language

  • Éva Heyman, Ágnes Zsolt: Eva lányom. Budapest, Új Idők Irodalmi Intézet RT (Singer és Wolfner), 1948.
    • Budapest: XXI. Szazad Kiado, 2011.

German translation

  • Ágnes Zsolt: The red bicycle , from the Hungarian by Ernö Zeltner. With the mother's introduction and an afterword by Gábor Murányi, Vienna: Nischen Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-9503345-0-0 .

More translations

  • Yehudah Marton (Ed.): Yomanah shel Eṿah Haiman. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1964. (Hebrew)
    • “The Hebrew version was published in 1964 in Jerusalem. Marton describes the history of the Oradea Jewry, its social and cultural characteristics, speaks about Eva's family and about the atmosphere in which the Diary was born, in a twelve page introduction for the Hebrew version. Additionally, he wrote explanatory notes to the text, to render in a concise manner ideas that are foreign to the Hebrew reader. "
  • The diary of Eva Heyman . Introduction and notes by Judah Marton. translated from Hebrew into English by Moshe M. Kohn. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1974.
    • The Diary of Eva Heyman: Child of the Holocaust. Shapolsky Publishers, New York 1987, ISBN 0-933503-89-X .
  • Partial publication of the diary in translation from Hungarian into English by Susan Geroe at yizkor
  • Oliver Lustig: Jurnalul lui Éva Heyman. "Am trăit atît de puțin." , 1991 (ro) (translation from Hungarian into Romanian)
  • Silviu Goran: Eva Heyman. ISBN 973-8953-95-6 (ro)
  • Excerpts from Jacob Boas: We are witnesses. five diaries of teenagers who died in the Holocaust. Henry Holt, New York 1995, ISBN 0-8050-3702-0 .
    • Jacob Boas in Dutch translation: Eva, Dawid, Moshe, Yitschak en Anne: oorlogsdagboeken van joodse kinderen.
    • Jacob Boas in Russian translation: My svideteli: dnevniki pi︠a︡ti podrostkov, zhertv Kholokosta. Optima, Kiev 2001, ISBN 966-7869-05-9 .
  • Excerpts from Laurel Holliday: Children in the Holocaust and World War II: their secret diaries. Pocket Books, New York New York: Pocket Books, 1995. [ An anthology of twenty-three diaries written during the Holocaust by children, some of whom were later murdered by the Nazis ]

literature

  • Gergely Kunt: Egy kamasznapló két olvasata. (Reconsidering a Child's Diary). In: Korall - Társadalomtörténeti folyóirat. (Coral - Journal for Social History) 41/2010, pp. 51-80. (English summary)
  • Béla Zsolt: Nine suitcases. From the Hungarian. by Angelika Máté, with an afterward by Ferenc Kőszeg. German Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-423-13013-X .

Contemporary history

  • Dezso Schon among others: A tegnap varosa; a nagyvaradi zsidosag emlekkonyve. [Ir ve-etmol; sefer zikaron le-yehudei Grosswardein]. Tel-Aviv 1981.
    • engl. by Susan Geroe: The City of Yesterday: Memorial Book of the Jews of Nagyvarad (Oradea, Romania). at yizkor
  • Robert Rozett: Oradea . In: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust , Volume III, 1990, pp. 1088-1090.
  • Nagyvárad. In: Guy Miron (ed.): The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust. Volume 2. Jerusalem 2009, ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 , pp. 511-513.
  • Wolfgang Benz (ed.): Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9. Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-57238-3 .
  • Randolph L. Braham : The politics of genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary. Columbia University Press, New York 1981, ISBN 0-231-05208-1 .

Web links

Commons : Éva Heyman  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information on Eva Heyman at USHMM
  2. ↑ Lemma Nagyvárad , in: Guy Miron [Ed.]: The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust , Jerusalem 2009, pp. 516-518.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Benz: Work education camp, ghettos, youth protection camp, police detention camp, special camp, gypsy camp , forced labor camp , p. 365.
  4. ^ Encyclopedia of the Holocaust , III, 1990, p. 1090.
  5. ↑ In the text there are indications that Éva had already kept a diary before. See The diary of Eva Heyman. Introduction Translated by: Susan Geroe at yizkor
  6. ↑ Béla Zsolt describes the true dimension of the sexual coercion of young women in the ghetto in "Nine Suitcases"
  7. ↑ Braham states that the deportations began on May 24th in the secondary ghetto, on May 27th in the main ghetto and ended on June 3rd. Randolph L. Braham: The politics of genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary. , P. 579 ff, here p. 583. Braham lists a number of names of the Hungarian perpetrators.
  8. ↑ Article Eva Heyman at USHMM
  9. ^ Editor of the Zsolt diary , Ágnes 1912–1951 at worldcat.
  10. ^ The diary of Eva Heyman. Introduction Translated by: Susan Geroe at yizkor.
  11. ^ The film Eszterkönyv was shown in 1990 at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival .
personal data
SURNAME Heyman, Éva
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heyman, Eva
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian diarist and Holocaust victim
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Nagyvárad
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 1944
Place of death Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp