In the early 1950s, a young, dark-haired, slender woman sometimes visited the lesbian bars in New York’s Greenwich Village to accompany the regular Lu Burke. Burke worked for New Yorker magazine, the brunette partner in an advertising agency. The young woman’s name was Margot Heumann. She came from war-torn Europe and was recognizable as a Holocaust survivor by a tattoo on her forearm.
Margot’s story is the first evidence of a queer woman who survived the concentration camps as a Jew. Many researchers pointed out how difficult lesbian history is to research – invisible and at the same time viewed as unimportant. In the concentration camps, lesbian women encountered the homophobia of the other inmates. Their prejudices persisted in post-war society, so that the few queer Holocaust survivors hardly ever recorded their stories. The few exceptions so far are all men.
Today Margot Heumann is 92 years old
Margot’s voice is unique, for Holocaust research, for women’s history and for queer studies at the same time. I got to know Margot through my research on queer Holocaust history. She is 92 years old today and still lives in the USA. I traveled to her, and for a week she told me her story.
Margot was born in 1928, the first daughter of the retailer Karl Heumann and his wife Johanna in Hellenthal on the Belgian border. A younger sister came three years later. The girls had a happy childhood in the Eifel and later in Lippe. The family was doing well economically and there were many relatives to play with. In 1937 the Heumanns moved to Bielefeld, where their father worked for the Aid Association of German Jews. When Margot was ostracized as a Jew at school, her parents sent her to a Jewish school.
She was drawn to girls early on
Margot discovered early on that she was drawn to girls. With a smile, she talks about her best friend: When she reached puberty and wore a tight sweater with a pocket at breast level, Margot was happy to put her hand in her pocket and explain how much she liked this bag. When I asked, Margot replied: “She was not a lesbian. She got married and, as far as I know, she had no further relationships with women. ”The two never talked about it.
From September 1941 Margot and her family had to wear the yellow star, and the deportations began shortly afterwards. As their father worked for a Jewish institution, the Heumanns were not deported to the extermination camps in 1942, like most Bielefeld Jews, but to the Theresienstadt ghetto in June 1943.
In Theresienstadt, children were placed in youth homes. There they received more substantial food and less overcrowded accommodation. Responsible for this was the so-called child welfare, headed by Gonda Redlich and Fredy Hirsch, whose homosexuality was known. Since the children were housed separately according to gender, age and language, Margot and her sister came to two different homes.
During the day they were considered best friends
In her home, Margot met Dita, a pretty Viennese girl. Dita was deported to Theresienstadt without her parents, accompanied only by her aunt and grandmother. Margot fell in love with Dita and the two became inseparable. At night they lay in bed and exchanged tenderness. “We didn’t actually have sex. Very close to it, but no sex. “
During the day, Margot and Dita were just best friends, and Dita also had a boyfriend. “I was jealous,” said Margot, “but there was nothing I could have done about it, and neither did I. At that time I was smart enough not to make a riot. “
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At the age of 15, Margot knew that her love had no place in public. Other girls also shared the bed at night, says Margot. Some of them survived and reported about their “best friends” in their memoirs, but withheld love and intimacy. Margot’s insight reminds us that we shouldn’t ignore the queer view of teenage friendships in the Holocaust.
It was then that Margot also got to know her other great passion, opera. The cultural life in Theresienstadt was an important spiritual support for the prisoners and is rightly known today. Decades later, Margot became an enthusiastic visitor to the New York Metropolitan Opera. Its first performance was La Bohème from Theresienstadt. Margot lights up when she tells how she first heard the aria “How ice cold is this little hand / Let me warm it up”.
Further texts on queer history in the Nazi era:
In May 1944 the Heumanns were deported to Auschwitz, to the so-called Theresienstadt family camp. Margot cried all the way to Auschwitz – because she was separated from Dita. A few days later, Dita and her aunt also arrived. It was in the family camp that Margot first experienced how terribly hungry can be.
The family camp was disbanded at the beginning of July. Most of the people there now knew about the gas chambers and thus also about the importance of the upcoming selection, in which the people considered fit for work were selected for forced labor. Dita and her aunt “passed” the selection. Margot’s parents didn’t try because they didn’t give Margot’s thirteen-year-old sister a chance. Margot decided to follow Dita. Her mother was very upset: she said the family should stay together. When Margot said goodbye to her father, he blessed her. She saw him cry for the first time.
At that time all her thoughts were with Dita. Today Margot cries when she talks about it. In the women’s camp in Birkenau, Margot and Dita were assigned to be transported to Hamburg, to the Neuengamme satellite camps.
Starved and weakened
The Jewish women from Auschwitz were the first female prisoners there. They were starved and weakened, had to clear rubble and build emergency shelters for bombed-out civilians, almost always outdoors and with long workdays. Margot’s group passed through three camps: Dessauer Ufer in the so-called Freihafen, Neugraben in the south and Tiefstack in the east of Hamburg.
This showed how age shaped the camp experience. While the older women suffered from the rough handling of the camp as well as from hunger and cold, the 16-year-old girls also experienced the camp as an adventure: They picked mushrooms in the nearby forest and rolled down a hill through freshly fallen snow.
They were hungry, but they always found ways to get something to eat to share. Dita was Margot’s one and only. The two secured a bed at the end of the barrack where they could be together at night. But the queer relationship was disturbing, and once Margot heard a loud remark “This is not normal.” Dita’s aunt defended her: the two were still children.
At the beginning of April 1945, the SS dissolved the satellite camps and sent the Jewish women to Bergen-Belsen. The conditions in Hamburg were pathetic, but in Belsen the horror was even greater. “The dead were piled high on both sides of the street. It was just amazing. “
When the camp was liberated, Margot only weighed 35 kilos
When the British army liberated the camp on April 15th, Margot was sick with typhus and weighed only 35kg – and that at a height of 1.67 meters. She was hospitalized for two months and was taken to Sweden in July to recover. Dita stayed behind and later went to England.
Margot spent two years in Sweden. She recovered, learned Swedish, and was able to lead something like a “normal” teenage life for the first time. She went to school – and also had sex for the first time with a beautiful, blond, tall Swede, as she told me. In 1947 she moved to the USA to live with her relatives. She actually only wanted to stay a year, but the lesbian life in New York cast a spell over her. Through a friend, Margot was employed by an advertising agency that over the years has grown to be one of the largest in the world. And she got to know Lu Burke, an intellectual, WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) – and a legendary editor for the “New Yorker”.
After three years, Margot decided that she wanted to have children. She saw the only way to get there in marriage to a man. She parted ways with Burke and married a colleague from another agency in 1953. The next twenty years of Margot’s life may on the surface seem like the All American Dream. She had two children, lived in a house in Brooklyn, and was later able to pursue her career thanks to a black housekeeper. At the same time, Margot was having an affair with a neighbor; the husbands thought the women were best friends.
At 88, she comes out
When asked if her husband noticed anything, Margot emphasizes, “I’m a very good actress.” It was only when her husband, who was addicted to gambling, started abusing her in the 1970s, that Margot left him. However, she only dared to make a conscious new beginning at the age of 88, when she moved to a retirement home in the warm southwest of the USA: She came out to her family. Nobody was surprised: everyone had always known.
Why is it not until 2020 that we will hear Margot, the first lesbian voice of a Holocaust survivor? Margot has been interviewed several times for Holocaust archives. The story she told me was actually contained in all of her testimonies in the well-known Holocaust archives – but hidden. Dita appeared as the “best friend”. Nobody questioned why she was so important to Margot.
A biography as a self-determined lesbian woman
It was only through years of research that Margot’s relatives found out about my work through a colleague in Jerusalem and introduced me to her. Margot knew that I was a lesbian myself and kept asking me about it. So she could feel safe and tell her biography as a self-determined lesbian woman.
It is tragic that homophobic prejudice prevented many queer Jewish women who survived concentration camps from leaving testimonies of their lives. This is another reason why we should listen carefully to Margot’s story.
– The author is Associate Professor of Modern Continental European History at the University of Warwick (Great Britain).
One Response
Thank you for this astounding life story of a dear and courageous Lesbian woman, who I have had the pleasure of meeting.