The Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes

A Memoir

Eva Umlauf author Stefanie Oswalt author Shelley Frisch translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Mandel Vilar Press

Published:20th Jun '24

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The Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes cover

Beautifully translated by Shelley Frisch, The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes is 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...

“Among the accounts of people who survived the Holocaust, Eva Umlauf’s is a most remarkable one. At the age of two she had a number tattooed on her arm, and against all odds survived to tell her tale. A tale well worth reading.” Dr. Anita Lasker Wallfisch, German-British cellist, and the last surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz


"This not just the story of survival but also of a childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust, a youth under Communism, and a new life in a newly emerging Germany. It is a story which will surprise even those who think they know everything about the Holocaust/". --Professor Michael Brenner, The Director of American University’s Center for Israel Studies and 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 and co-author of the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times, that was awarded a National Jewish Book Aw

ISBN: 9781942134961

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

249 pages