Overview
- Interview Summary
- Eva Cohn, born in 1929 (some of her personal documents say 1927 because she had previously decided to pretend to be two years older to work), describes growing up in Kal, Hungary; her father, who exported fruit and vegetables; her parents, Samuel and Ethel Kallus; her three brothers (Bela, Miklos, and Tibor) and three sisters; living a traditional Jewish life in a small rural community; her brothers having to all enroll in the Hungarian Army in 1943 and carrying out forced labor behind the German lines at the Russian front (all three survived the war); the move of her two oldest sisters, Jolan and Ersebet, to Budapest in the spring of 1944 (Ersebet died in Bergen-Belsen and Jolan survived); being deported to Auschwitz with her parents and her youngest sister, Mira; being the only one chosen for work, while the others were murdered immediately upon arrival; living in the children's barrack for three months; being transferred to slave labor in a factory in northern Germany; working to assemble radio transmitters; the evacuation of the factory into a salt mine; being liberated in spring 1945; going to Denmark with one of the White Red Cross buses; going to Malmö and then to Osby; being quarantined with a hundred other girls for about a month; Hungary's ambassador to Sweden recruiting a famous, former dancer Bea Lajtai to help the girls with the Swedish language; befriending Bea Lajtai; getting married in 1948 to Franz Cohn; studying various subjects and taking student exams; identifying as Swedish; going to the synagogue for holidays; and the importance to her of having a daughter.
- Interviewee
- Eva Cohn
- Interviewer
- Carolyn Östberg
- Date
-
interview:
2017 April 24
- Geography
-
creation:
Stockholm (Sweden)
- Credit Line
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection
Physical Details
- Language
- Swedish
- Extent
-
1 digital file : MP4.
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Topical Term
- World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, Hungarian. Forced labor. Holocaust survivors. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Hungary. Jewish families--Hungary. Jewish refugees--Sweden. Jewish women in the Holocaust. Jews--Hungary--Kál. Quarantine. Sisters. Women concentration camp inmates. World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Germany. World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Poland. World War, 1939-1945--Deportations from Hungary. Women--Personal narratives.
- Geographic Name
- Germany. Hungary--History--1918-1945. Kál (Hungary) Malmö (Sweden) Oświęcim (Poland)
- Personal Name
- Cohn, Eva, 1929-
- Corporate Name
- Auschwitz (Concentration camp)
Administrative Notes
- Holder of Originals
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- This is a witness interview of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Perpetrators, Collaborators, and Witnesses: The Jeff and Toby Herr Testimony Initiative, a multi-year project to record the testimonies of non-Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust.
- Funding Note
- The production of this interview was made possible by Jeff and Toby Herr.
The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. - Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 09:41:29
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn594412
Additional Resources
Summaries (2)
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- This record is digitized but cannot be downloaded online.
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