Surviving Together | Queer Holocaust Survivor Margot Heuman(n) | Pride Month | USC Shoah Foundation

“You have to have it within yourself, and whatever comes from the outside is secondary. You can cope with it, if you have someone you care for, if you have certain principles you abide by, and if you do what you feel is right and not what the world tells you to do. I think that’s more important than anything else.”

In Theresienstadt ghetto, the Holocaust historian Dr. Anna Hájková has shown, teenage Margot Heuman(n) entered a romantic relationship with a girl named Dita. After being deported to Auschwitz and Neuengamme, Margot and Dita continued their romance in the camps, and survived together.

When Margot Heuman(n) told us her story in 1994, she was not able to tell her whole story, for reasons having to do with personal preferences or interviewer lines of questioning.

More than two decades later, Margot decided to come out to her family. Between 2017 and 2022, she shared her story with Anna Hájková, who has written about Margot Heuman extensively, and even wrote a theater play together with Erika Hughes. Link: https://theconversation.com/lgbt-hist...

Thanks to Hájková’s work, we can now understand the traces of queer love in Margot’s early testimony.

To celebrate the first day of Pride Month, we honor LGBTQ+ survivors of the Holocaust, and recall how difficult living - and speaking - candidly was until recent years. In our Visual History Archive, which contains interviews with over 55,000 interviewees, only ~10 interviewees openly identify as queer in their interviews.

Margot and Dita remained close until Dita’s passing in 2011. Margot passed away in May 2022.

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