The Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes (Paperback)

Beautifully translated by Shelley Frisch, The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes is a poignant and riveting memoir that sets a family story in historical context and brings psychological insight to bear on accounts of emotional trauma. 

Having achieved prominence as a pediatrician, child therapist, and international speaker, Eva finally decided to tell her story. In 2016, at the age of seventy-four, with the assistance of journalist Stefanie Oswalt, Eva Umlauf published Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erinnerungen (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag).

As someone who has endured the effects of the Holocaust from infancy, she writes, I wish for all that has happened to be understood and processed from diverse perspectives so that personal suffering, societal ruptures, and brutal transgenerational traumas can be prevented from being passed on to future generations.” This book draws on years of interviews, copious correspondence, archival research in Europe and Israel, trips to labor and concentration camps, and the author’s personal recollections.

On November 3, 1944, a toddler named Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, was branded prisoner A-26959 in Auschwitz. She fainted in her mother’s arms but survived the tattooing and countless other shocks. Eva Hecht was born on December 19, 1942, in Novaky, Slovakia, a labor camp for Jews. Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes, were imprisoned in this camp until their deportation to Auschwitz. A month prior to their arrival there, several thousand mothers and their children had been gassed. Now that the Red Army was rapidly advancing in Poland, the murders stopped. Agnes, then pregnant with her second daughter, and Eva were still alive when the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Her father was transferred to Melk, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and died there in March 1945. 

In late April, Nora, Eva’s sister, was born. Agnes Hecht remained in the camp infirmary until her two little girls were well enough to travel, then brought them back to her home in Trencín in western Slovakia. Eva grew up with a mother who had to “survive her survival”—the little family lived with the loss in the Holocaust of the husband/father, the mother’s three siblings, and the grandparents and great-grandparents. Having also lost her family’s fortune, Agnes worked hard to create a normal home life for her daughters. 

Like many survivors in the post-Holocaust era, Eva’s mother never talked about her experiences. Eva suffered frequent flare-ups of the illnesses she had suffered in Auschwitz. She did well at school and went on to study medicine in Bratislava. In 1966 she married Jakob Sultanik, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had resettled in Munich, Germany. Eva left the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1967 to join him in West Germany. There she began her practice as a pediatrician and later as a psychotherapist—and for the first time she had the opportunity to live out her Jewish identity. Unfortunately, Eva's husband, 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, Oliver and Julian. Every so often, the horrors of Eva's early years would resurface in nightmares involving dead babies and Auschwitz gas chambers. 

Author: Eva Umlauf. Although branded for life in Auschwitz at two years old, Eva Umlauf survived and returned to Trencín after the war. She studied medicine in Bratislava and specialized in pediatrics. In 1966 she married and moved to Munich the following year. After the death of her first husband, she worked as a clinic doctor. She later remarried and ran a pediatric practice. She is the mother of three sons. Today she still works as a psychotherapist. In 2011 she first spoke at a commemoration ceremony in Auschwitz, and since then she has been involved as a contemporary witness in international conferences and many research projects.

Assistant Author: Stefanie Oswalt. After earning her doctorate in Jewish Studies in Potsdam, Stefanie Oswalt worked as a freelance journalist for Deutschland Radio and as an author in Berlin. Most recently, she published Ari Means Lion (with Ari Rath, Zsolnay Verlag, 2012).

Translator: Shelley Frisch. Shelley Frisch holds a doctorate in German from Princeton University. She taught at Columbia University and Haverford College, where she chaired the German Department, before turning to translation full-time in the 1990s. Her translations from German, including biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and Franz Kafka, as well as other works of fiction and nonfiction, have been awarded numerous translation prizes, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Foreword: Michael Brenner. Michael Brenner is the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies and director of American University’s Center for Israel Studies. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He is the author of nine books, including After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany and Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. In addition, he co-authored the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times—for which he was awarded a National Jewish Book Award—and edited nineteen books.

Afterword: Naomi Umlauf. Naomi Umlauf, who is Eva Umlauf’s granddaughter and a student at Brown University, discusses the impact of the Holocaust legacy on her family and her own future as a third-generation survivor.