A
thirteen-year-old girl, Eva Heyman, wrote these lines in
her secret diary on May 30, 1944 - her last diary entry.
She called her diary 'my best friend' and poured her fears
into it:
Yet,
my little Diary, I don't want to die, I still want to live
.. I would wait for the end of the war in a cellar, or in
the attic, or any hole, I would, my little Diary, I would
even allow that cross-eyed gendarme who took the flour
from us to kiss me, only not to be killed, only to be left
alive!
Eva
Heyman was born in Nagyvarad, Hungary in 1931. The
family's feelings of security collapsed, however, when
Germany invaded Hungary, and the brutality of the Nazis
accelerated with murder, violence and terror. Eva lived
with her grandparents, because her parents divorced and
her mother, in the diary called Agi, remarried. The family
were at great risk because they were Jewish, and Eva and
her grandparents were arrested and deported to the
deathcamp Auschwitz on June 2, 1944. They were killed
October, 1944.
Eva's
mother, Agnes Zsolt, was rescued from Bergen-Belsen by
Allied troops in 1945. She came back to search for her
daughter, but gradually realized that she had been killed.
She found and published Eva's secret diary and told how
Eva was sent to the gas chambers by Josef Mengele
at Auschwitz:
"A
good-hearted female doctor was trying to hide my child,
but Mengele found her without effort. Eva's feet were full
of sore wounds. 'Now look at you', Mengele shouted, 'you
frog, your feet are foul, reeking with pus! Up with you on
the truck!' He transported his human material to the
crematorium on yellow-coloured trucks. Eyewitnesses told
me that he himself had pushed her on to the truck."
Eva
Heyman, thirteen-years-old, was gassed that same day, on
October 17, 1944 ..
After arranging for her daughter's diary to be published,
Eva's grief-stricken mother Agnes Zsolt succumbed to a
downward spiral of self-destructiveness and despair and
committed suicide.
