The gay Holocaust survivor who spoke of love in the camps

Margot Heuman 1928–2022

Margot Heuman believed she owed her life to her love for another woman.

The German Jew was just 14 when she and her family were sent to The resienstadt, a Nazi-run ghetto in occupied Czechoslovakia. There, she met Dita Neumann, a Jewish Viennese teen, and the two fell in love. Both of their families were sent to Auschwitz and other camps, and all the members perished except the two girls, who ended up together in Bergen-Belsen. After the war, the two remained lifelong friends, and Heuman came out a few years ago—becoming one of the few Holocaust survivors to speak publicly of her experience as a lesbian. “Because I took care of another human being,” she said in 1992, “we managed to never lose our dignity, and we remained people.”

Heuman was born in Hellenthal, Germany, said The New York Times. Her father owned a dry-goods store, and her mother was a homemaker until the family was deported. At the camps, Heuman was “called out only once,” when fellow prisoners, seeing her with her girlfriend, said, “That’s not natural!” When BergenBelsen was freed, Heuman was evacuated to Stockholm weighing just 76 pounds.

In 1947, Heuman joined extended family in New York, said Slate. After City College, she worked for an ad agency, married an accountant, and had two children before divorcing in 1976. Her beloved Dita, who married a doctor in Canada, died of cancer in 2011 with Heuman at her side. In 2019, after coming out to her kids, Heuman explained her decision to marry a man. “I felt I owed it to my parents to have children,” she said, but added that she’d owed it to herself to leave the marriage, saying, “Life is too short.”