Of all people, those who suffered the most, who lost everything except their own lives - they are the ones who have made it their task to keep the pain alive, to report on it again and again and to remind us so that the Shoah can never happen again. One of these few is Eva Szepesi. Together with her daughter Anita Schwarz, she shook up our world at the Heidelberg Intercultural Center, which seems so far removed from back then, and reminded us: "The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. It began with words, silence and looking away."
Born Eva Diamant in a suburb of Budapest in 1932, she looks back on a happy childhood - until the first anti-Jewish laws changed her life in 1938. For little Eva, this meant above all that she was no longer allowed to skate or go to the swimming pool, that the choir she loved singing in was banned and that the family had to give up their pets. One scene at the water pump in front of her parents' house remained particularly painful in her memory when her friends washed blood from a raw piece of meat: "Yes, look! Your father's blood will soon flow just like this piece of meat! Come over here! I dare you!" The ostracism and hatred of her former friends meant the end of Eva's childhood.
With the occupation of Hungary by the German Wehrmacht in 1944, the situation worsened dramatically. Her father was drafted into labor service, relatives were deported and Eva had to flee with her aunt. Arrest by soldiers was followed by concentration camps and finally deportation to Auschwitz. Shaved, tattooed and forced to do forced labor, Diamant clung to the hope that her mother and brother would be waiting for her somewhere. It was not until many years later that she learned that both had long since been murdered.
Her physical weakness saved her life: Too weak for the death march, she stayed behind in the camp with around 400 other children when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. "Suddenly a Russian soldier with a cap bent over me. He saved me. I tried to live," she remembers the moment of liberation.
It was only decades later that Eva found the strength to talk about her experiences and give her family and the public access to her pain. The memories of her family, her lost childhood and her survival in the camp remain with her to this day - and make her story a powerful testimony against forgetting. "I often ask myself why my little brother was murdered if I am allowed to live. But now it's my job. I speak for my mother and my brother, for the many innocent people who were killed. And that is my message, which I tell, because the others can no longer do so."
The discussion was moderated by David Lüllemann, HfJS Heidelberg.
The event was organized by the HfJS Heidelberg & the Interkulturelles Zentrum Heidelberg, with generous support from the Zeugen der Zeitzeugen e. V. and the Freundeskreis der Hochschule e. V.
