Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes

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 Trenčín 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. 

Eva Hecht was born on December 19, 1942, in Nov Slovakia, in a labor camp for Jews. Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes, were imprisoned in this labor camp until their deportation to Auschwitz. After arriving at Auschwitz on November 3, 1944, accompanied by her pregnant mother, Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, 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  Nazi concentration camp. The advancing Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Eva and Agnes remained in the camp infirmary because Eva was too sick to travel and Agnes was about to give birth to her second baby girl, Nora. Shortly afterward, Agnes Hecht brough her two little girls back to her home in Trenčín in western Slovakia. 

Eva grew up with a mother who had to survive her survival—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 Agnes worked hard to create a sense of normal life for her daughters. Eva continued to have flare-ups of the illnesses she suffered n Auschwitz. But 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 who resettled in Munich, Germany. Eva left the Communist regime in 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 and dead babies. Having achieved prominence as a pediatrician, child therapist, and international speaker, Eva Umlauf decided to finally tell her story. In 2016, at the age of seventy-four, with the assistance of journalist Stefanie Oswalt, Eva published Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erinnerungen (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag).

Associate Author: Stefanie Oswalt studied history and literature in Cologne, London and Munich. She received her doctorate in Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam. She worked, among other things, at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies. Since 2000 she has worked as a freelance radio journalist for Deutschland Radio, as a  publicist and as a co-author on various book publications on contemporary history.  She worked as a freelance journalist and as an author in Berlin. Herr publications include Siegfried Jacobsohn, A Life for the World Stage: A Berlin Biography (2001), Ari is called Lion (with Ari Rath, 2012)  Ari Rath: Raging Reporter,Chronicler, Bridge Builder (2022)  

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. He is co-author of the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times, for which he was awarded a National Jewish Book Award, and editor of nineteen books.

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