Eva Szepesi

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Eva Szepesi was born Éva Diamant on 29 September 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, and grew up in Pesterzsébet, where her parents ran a men’s clothing shop. Her childhood changed as antisemitic laws brought exclusion and persecution. Her father was taken away for forced labour and never returned. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, her mother sent eleven-year-old Eva across the border into Slovakia with her aunt, hoping to save her life.

Eva hid with several families before being discovered and taken to Sereď transit camp. On 2 November 1944, she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, alone and separated from her family. During registration, a female guard quietly instructed her to claim she was sixteen, although she was only twelve. She followed the instruction and was registered as prisoner A-26877, the number tattooed on her left forearm.

By January 1945, hunger, illness and exposure had left her too weak to move. When the SS evacuated prisoners on death marches, she remained behind among the dead, apparently mistaken for a corpse. On 27 January 1945, a Soviet soldier found her alive. Eva remembered him feeding her snow and smiling at her—the first moments of her liberation.

After recovering, she returned to Budapest, where an uncle took her in. Her parents and younger brother Tamás had not survived. She trained as a seamstress and married Andor Szepesi in 1951. The couple moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1954 for his work and remained in Germany after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. They raised two daughters.

For fifty years, Eva remained silent about Auschwitz. A return visit in 1995 helped her begin sharing her experiences.