Number on Your Forearm is Blue Like Your Eyes

Author: Eva Umlauf. Although branded for life in Auschwitz at two years old, Eva Umlauf survived and returned to Trenčín after the war. She studied medicine in Bratislava and specialized in pediatrics. In 1966 she married and moved to Munich the following year. After the death of her first husband, she worked as a clinic doctor. She later remarried and ran a pediatric practice. She is the mother of three sons. Today she still works as a psychotherapist. In 2011 she first spoke at a commemoration ceremony in Auschwitz, and since then she has been involved as a contemporary witness in international conferences and many research projects.Assistant Author: Stefanie Oswalt. After earning her doctorate in Jewish Studies in Potsdam, Stefanie Oswalt worked as a freelance journalist for Deutschland Radio and as an author in Berlin. Most recently, she published Ari Means Lion (with Ari Rath, Zsolnay Verlag, 2012).Translator: Shelley Frisch. Shelley Frisch holds a doctorate in German from Princeton University. She taught at Columbia University and Haverford College, where she chaired the German Department, before turning to translation full-time in the 1990s. Her translations from German, including biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and Franz Kafka, as well as other works of fiction and nonfiction, have been awarded numerous translation prizes, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.Foreword: Michael Brenner. Michael Brenner is the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies and director of American University’s Center for Israel Studies. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He is the 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. In addition, he co-authored the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times—for which he was awarded a National Jewish Book Award—and edited nineteen books.Afterword: Naomi Umlauf. Naomi Umlauf, who is Eva Umlauf’s granddaughter and a student at Brown University, discusses the impact of the Holocaust legacy on her family and her own future as a third-generation survivor.

• Table of Contentsthe witness                  Poem by Ján KaršaiForeword                    Professor Michael BrennerChapter 1                    The Heart Attack                                            February 2014Chapter 2                    Birth in Nováky                                              December 1942Chapter 3                    Arrival in Auschwitz                                      November 1944Chapter 4                    The Sledding Accident                                   February 1947Chapter 5                    Under the Red Dictatorship                            November 1952Chapter 6                    The Wedding: Starting Anew                         July 1966Chapter 7                    Jakob’s Death                                                 April 1971Chapter 8                    Julian’s Birth and the Return of the Trauma December 1985Chapter 9                    The Auschwitz Speech                                   January 2011Afterword                   Naomi Umlauf: A Granddaughter's ReflectionsNotesBibliographyPhoto creditsAcknowledgmentsTranslator’s Note

“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