Margot Heuman was 15 when she and her family were deported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia. It was a way station; the town was used as a "transit" camp to take Western Jews en route to Auschwitz and other concentration camps under Adolf Hitler's reign.
While she survived her time in the camps, Heuman's family- her father, mother, and sister- all perished. She was the rare lesbian Holocaust survivor who eventually "bore testimony" about her same-sex experience during those dark days.
Early life and time in the ghetto
Margot Cecile Heumann was born on February 17, 1928, in Hellenthal, Germany. (She dropped the final "n" from her name, pronounced HOY-man, when she became an American citizen in 1952.)
Her father, Karl, owned a dry goods store; her mother, Johanna (Falkenstein) Heumann, was a homemaker.
In 1943, she and her family were severed from their comfortable life in Lippstadt, Germany (where they were living at the time), and taken to Theresienstadt.
Yet Heuman was happy in the ghetto. The proscriptions that followed Kristallnacht curtailed Jewish life at home, but the Theresienstadt had culture, school, and community.
It was in the ghetto that she saw La Bohème- her first opera- and she would meet a Viennese girl named Dita Neumann.
Surviving Auschwitz with Dita
In 1944, Karl Heumann was caught stealing food, so he and his family were sent to Auschwitz. Dita and her family were sent there a few days later.
Heuman's father died in Auschwitz. Her mother and her younger sister, Lore, perished later in the camp at Stutthof.
Margot and Dita survived, chosen inexplicably for transport to various camps and eventually ending up in a labor camp in Hamburg.
In an oral history recorded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1992, Margot Heuman said she "stuck together" with Dita Neumann.
They were last imprisoned at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany when British forces liberated it on April 15, 1945. Neumann was sent to England, while Heuman was taken to Stockholm by the Swedish Red Cross.
Dita Neumann was the 'love of her life'
Margot Heuman moved to the US and married Charles Mendelson in 1952. (The pair had two children and divorced in 1976.)
She often spoke of the relationship with Neumann as a strong friendship, but she later cast it as a romantic bond.
She described Neumann as the "love of her life," and the two of them remained friends throughout their lives. While they did not stay together, Heuman was by Neumann's side when the latter died of cancer in 2011.
Margot Heuman died at age 94 on May 11, 2022, at a Green Valley, Arizona, hospital. She is survived by her son, daughter, five grandchildren, and one great-grandson.
In 1992, she said: "Because of my caring for another human being, we somehow never lost our dignity and remained people."
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