Burke was a notorious and feared language martinet, nicknamed Sarge by the production staff.) Heuman’s English by reading the dictionary with her. She met Lu Burke, who would go on to be a copy editor at The New Yorker, and they lived together as a couple in the West Village. Heuman worked in a button factory, as a nanny and as a waitress. But in 1947, at the urging of her mother’s brother, who wanted to gather what remained of his family, she moved to New York City. Margot weighed only 76 pounds and was nearly dead from starvation and typhus the schoolteacher sent her to summer camp and private schools and, Ms. (She dropped the final “n” from her name, pronounced HOY-man, when she became an American citizen in 1952.) Her father owned a dry goods store her mother, Johanna (Falkenstein) Heumann, was a homemaker.Īfter Bergen-Belsen, the site of Dita and Margot’s final internment, was liberated in April 1945, Dita was sent to England and the Swedish Red Cross brought Margot to Stockholm, where she was cared for by a schoolteacher who had volunteered to take her in. Heuman recalled, were called out only once, when a group of fellow prisoners, seeing them cuddle, sneered, “That’s not natural!” Dita’s aunt, who was interned with them, brushed the slur away. Hajkova said, homophobia was rampant in the camps, despite the progressive culture of Weimar Germany and the nascent prewar movement across Eastern Europe to decriminalize homosexuality, which had been cut short by the rise of the Nazis.īut Ms. Others bartered with their female guards sex for food or safety, or sought intimacy with fellow prisoners though neither partner identified as gay. Heuman, knew they were attracted to women before their deportation others discovered their sexuality once they were imprisoned. Sexuality was just as fluid and complex in the camps as in the outside world. Heuman’s story is one of four that will be included in her forthcoming book “Quartet: Sexuality, Queer Desire, and the Holocaust.” Hajkova’s research and connected the two. Of the 52,000 interviews with Jewish survivors in the Shoah Foundation’s archives, Hajkova said, “next to none of them speak about same-sex desire.”
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Hajkova, a queer woman, that she cast it as a romance. Heuman often told the story of her friendship with Dita, it was not until she met with Dr. Though the oral history of the Holocaust is vast, there are hardly any tales of queer survivors. Heuman was the rare survivor who eventually “bore testimony” to her same-sex experience in the concentration camps, as Anna Hajkova, an associate professor at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, and a scholar of queer history and the Holocaust, put it. Heuman, who went on to have a career in advertising in New York City, died on May 11 at a hospital in Green Valley, Ariz. Heuman said in 1992, in an oral history recorded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “we somehow never lost our dignity and remained people.” “Because of my caring for another human being,” Ms.
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But Margot and Dita survived, chosen inexplicably for transport to various camps and eventually ending up in a labor camp in Hamburg. Her mother, Johanna, and her younger sister, Lore, would perish later in the camp at Stutthof. Dita and her family were sent a month later. When in 1944 her father was caught stealing food, he and the family were sent to Auschwitz. Margot saw her first opera there, “La Bohème,” and she fell in love, with a Viennese girl named Dita Neumann. The proscriptions that followed Kristallnacht curtailed Jewish life at home, but Theresienstadt had culture, school and community. It was 1943, and the Heuman family had already been severed from the comfortable life they had been living in Lippstadt, Germany. Margot Heuman was 14 when she and her family were deported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish “transit” ghetto in Czechoslovakia that was a way station - a cruel intermezzo - for those who would be sent to the death camps.