Eva Brettler

With nowhere to go, Eva and Margit approached one of the tenants from their old apartment building to ask for help. He agreed to hide them, but while they were returning to their apartment for some belongings, Arrow Cross guards stopped them. The guards sent them to the police station and then assigned them to a brick factory. They stayed there for a brief period until they were ordered to join a death march to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

They were unprepared for the march, since they had dressed formally to register Eva for school. Margit was wearing high-heeled shoes, which were hard to walk in. While the children on the march were sometimes allowed to ride on wagons, Margit was pushed aside. A few moments later, Eva heard gunshots. She was only 7 years old when she realized that she had lost her mother.

During the march, the prisoners stopped in a ghetto where Eva was told to wait at the Red Cross station for relatives. When no one came, a stranger offered to take care of her. They traveled together from there to Ravensbrück on cattle cars. When they arrived at the camp, Eva’s caretaker was separated from her because she was a Mischling, only half-Jewish, and could receive better treatment. Eva was again alone, stripped naked, shaved, and sprayed with disinfectant, but she was brave enough to hide a gold ring, given to her by her parents, under her tongue. Another woman prisoner befriended Eva in the camp and told her to call her Tanta and “Never to give up hope.” When Tanta died, another “kind stranger” cared for her.

As the Soviet Army approached the camp, all the prisoners were put on cattle cars and sent to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Conditions at this camp were horrific, with “mountains of corpses” everywhere. Inmates died of starvation and disease. Because of her small size, Eva was able to squeeze through a small opening in a fence and steal potato peels from beneath the kitchen, which she shared with other prisoners. Eva wanted to be in the barracks with Luba, who was caring for some of the Jewish orphans, but there was no room for Eva. On April 15, 1945, the British Army liberated the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

Eva was 9 years old, filthy, and bitten by lice. She contracted typhus and was taken to a makeshift hospital. There, she ran into an old family friend who wanted to take her back to Budapest. Eva did not want to go, and instead, she was sent to an orphanage in Sweden. She reunited there with Luba, a woman who had bravely helped many children prisoners at Bergen Belsen. Luba comforted Eva when she lost the gold ring, her only remaining possession from her parents, while washing her hands. Luba told Eva that her dear mother’s love would always be in her heart.

At the orphanage one day, Eva was called into the principal’s office and told that her father Sandor had survived, and that he was looking for her. Eva took a plane from Sweden to Prague, where, in June 1947, she was reunited with her father, his new wife, and her halfbrother. They returned to Budapest together. She was first enrolled in a Jewish school, but it closed. She was forced to attend public school, where she still encountered a great deal of antisemitism.

Following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Eva left Hungary illegally, carrying only her Red Cross Certificate and her prayer book. She was granted refugee status in the U.S. in January 1957. Eva met a fellow Holocaust Survivor, Marten Brettler, on a blind date, and they were married four weeks later. She became a social worker and raised four children, Yisrael, Jeff, Linda and Sandra. Eva began speaking at the Museum of Tolerance in 2008 because “she survived due to the kindness of strangers and would like to inspire compassion in people today.”