Margot Heuman

Margot Heuman (born 17 February 1928) is a Holocaust survivor. She is the first woman known to have survived Nazi concentration camps despite being both Jewish and queer.

Life[]

Margot Heumann was born on 17 February 1928 in Hellenthal, Germany, close to the border of Belgium. She lived above a general store that her parents Carl Heumann and Johanna Falkenstein Heumann owned and ran, and her grandfather lived across the street. When Heumann was 4 years old, her family moved to Lippstadt, where she learned to swim in the Lippe. Heumann had a younger sister named Lore Heumann.^[1]

Nazi persecution[]

Stolpersteine for Margot Heumann and her family in Bielefeld, October 2020

When Heumann was nine years old, her family moved again to Bielefeld and enrolled her in public school.^[1] Her father worked for the  [de].^[2] A year later, she and her younger sister were expelled from school without warning. Their parents enrolled them in a Jewish school, where they had teachers who had been fired from schools by the Nazis.^[1]

In 1942, most Jews in Bielefeld were deported to extermination camps, but the Heumanns were sent to Theresienstadt Ghetto in June of that year because Carl Heumann worked for a Jewish organization. Children in Theresienstadt were placed in youth homes where they received better food and accommodations than others in the ghetto. Margot and her sister Lore were sent to separate homes.^[2] Margot met an Austrian girl named in the youth home,^[3] and the two slept together and were intimate but did not have sex. They kept their relationship secret.^[2]

In May 1943^[4] or 1944,^[2] the family was transported to Auschwitz.^[4] Neumann and her aunt arrived a few days later. Heumann's parents did not attempt the selection for forced labor because her younger sister would not have been able to pass, but Neumann and her aunt did, and Heumann chose to follow Neumann.^[2] The group of about 200 women who passed were transported by train from Auschwitz to Neuengamme concentration camp.^[5] Heumann did not see her parents or sister again;^[1] they are believed to have died at Auschwitz.^[6]

The group of Jewish women, including Heumann and Neumann who were 16 years old at the time, were the first female prisoners to arrive in Neuengamme, where they were forced to build shelters for German civilians and clean up rubble.^[2] The group was moved through three satellite camps of Neuengamme, including Dessauer Ufer from July to September 1944, Neugraben from September 1944 to February 1945, and Tiefstack from February to April 1945.^[3] Heumann and Neumann slept together in a bed at the end of their group's barracks, which disturbed some others, but Neumann's aunt defended the couple on the grounds that they were still children.^[2][7] Both Heumann and Neumann engaged in sexual barter with men while at Neuengamme, obtaining food which they then shared with each other.^[8] At the beginning of April 1945, the Schutzstaffel shut down Neuengamme and the Jewish women were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.^[2] Heumann walked the 100 kilometres (62 mi) from Neuengamme to Bergen-Belsen in two days with no shoes.^[5]

Later life[]

Heumann was freed from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945, by British soldiers. She had typhus and weighed only 35 kilograms (77 lb) at a height of 1.67 metres (5.5 ft). She was hospitalized for two months,^[2] after which the Red Cross brought her to Sweden to recover^[1] while Neumann stayed behind.^[9] Heumann spent two years in Sweden, where she attended school, before she moved to New York City; she only intended to stay in the United States for a year, but stayed because she was able to live as a lesbian.^[2] Upon moving to the United States, she changed the spelling of her last name to "Heuman".^[3]

Heumann was employed by an advertising agency in New York City. In the early 1950s, she was sometimes seen visiting lesbian bars in Greenwich Village, New York, with New Yorker editor . In 1953 she broke up with Burke because she wanted to have children and knew she would need to marry a man to do so. She married a colleague from another advertising agency and had two children,^[2] whom she did not raise religious because she no longer believed in God.^[5] Eventually she reentered her career in advertising after hiring a Black housekeeper, while also having an affair with a married woman who lived next door.^[2]

In the 1970s, Heumann's husband was addicted to gambling and began abusing her, so she left him. At the age of 88, she moved to the Southwestern United States and came out to her family as a lesbian, which did not surprise them.^[2]

Heumann suffered from severe depression and went to a psychiatrist for years after the Holocaust. As of May 2020, she was 92 years old and living in the Arizona desert with her dog.^[5]

Historical significance[]

Margot Heumann is the first known woman to have survived the Nazi concentration camps despite being both Jewish and queer. Although she openly discussed her queerness in several interviews for archives about the Holocaust, those archives kept it hidden, instead describing Neumann as her best friend. In an article about Heumann in Der Tagesspiegel, Anna Hájková wrote that it was "tragic that homophobic prejudice prevented a number of queer Jewish women who survived concentration camps from leaving testimonies of their lives", arguing that Heumann's story was even more important because of that fact.^[2][a]

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