Éva Szepesi

Éva Szepesi was born on September 29, 1932, in Budapest as Éva Diamant. Her parents ran a men’s clothing store and had a second child, Tamás. When German troops occupied Hungary in March 1944, the targeted deportation of Hungarian Jews began. At the age of eleven, Éva fled on foot with her aunt, walking eleven hours through a forest into Slovakia. However, the Nazis discovered their hiding place and deported the eleven-year-old via the Sered transit camp on the last transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
She arrived in Auschwitz on November 2, 1944, and thanks to a tip from a Slovak guard, claimed during registration that she was sixteen. This saved her from immediate death in the gas chambers, as all younger prisoners were considered unfit for work. In January 1945, she endured a week without food, surrounded by piles of corpses, in order to avoid being sent on one of the final death marches. On January 27, 1945, Éva was liberated in Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army, one of only 400 surviving children.
After a hospital stay, she returned to Budapest, where her uncle found her in a children’s home. Her parents and younger brother Tamás, had been murdered in the Holocaust. Éva lived with her uncle and aunt into the 1950s, completed her schooling, and trained as a seamstress. In 1951, she married sales representative Andor Szepesi, with whom she moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1954.
Her daughters Judith and Anita persuaded her to attend the 50th anniversary commemoration at Auschwitz in 1995. There, she spoke with young people for the first time about her memories. That initial conversation inspired her to dedicate herself to sharing her testimony ever since. Éva Szepesi is actively committed to remembrance and to combating antisemitism, and for several years she has been a loyal supporter of the initiative “!Nie Wieder. Memorial Day in German Football.”