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).
