(MUNICH) — Only 2 years old and so ill she had to stay on for weeks after liberation, Eva Umlauf was one of the youngest prisoners to be freed from Auschwitz.
Although she has no conscious memories stretching so far back, her early childhood in the Nazi death camp was to cast a dark shadow over her entire life.
“Auschwitz is deeply burned inside my body and soul,” Umlauf said on a January day almost 75 years after Auschwitz was freed by the Soviet Red Army. A petite woman with a pageboy haircut and eyes as blue as the camp tattoo on her arm, the 77-year-old doctor reminisced about her post-war childhood.
“There was an emptiness growing up after Auschwitz, so many of our family members were gone,” she said.
“It was just my mom, my sister and me who survived,” Umlauf added in a calm, measured voice, sitting in her elegant apartment on the outskirts of Munich. “We saw my father for the last time at the ramp at Auschwitz when we were taken off the train.”
It’s a miracle that Umlauf su..