Heuman, knew they were attracted to women before their deportation others discovered their sexuality once they were imprisoned. Sexuality was just as fluid and complex in the camps as in the outside world. Heuman’s story is one of four that will be included in her forthcoming book “Quartet: Sexuality, Queer Desire, and the Holocaust.” Hajkova’s research and connected the two. Of the 52,000 interviews with Jewish survivors in the Shoah Foundation’s archives, Hajkova said, “next to none of them speak about same-sex desire.” Hajkova, a queer woman, that she cast it as a romance. Heuman often told the story of her friendship with Dita, it was not until she met with Dr. Though the oral history of the Holocaust is vast, there are hardly any tales of queer survivors. Heuman was the rare survivor who eventually “bore testimony” to her same-sex experience in the concentration camps, as Anna Hajkova, an associate professor at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, and a scholar of queer history and the Holocaust, put it. Heuman, who went on to have a career in advertising in New York City, died on May 11 at a hospital in Green Valley, Ariz. Heuman said in 1992, in an oral history recorded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “we somehow never lost our dignity and remained people.” “Because of my caring for another human being,” Ms. But Margot and Dita survived, chosen inexplicably for transport to various camps and eventually ending up in a labor camp in Hamburg. Her mother, Johanna, and her younger sister, Lore, would perish later in the camp at Stutthof. Dita and her family were sent a month later.
When in 1944 her father was caught stealing food, he and the family were sent to Auschwitz. Margot saw her first opera there, “La Bohème,” and she fell in love, with a Viennese girl named Dita Neumann.
The proscriptions that followed Kristallnacht curtailed Jewish life at home, but Theresienstadt had culture, school and community. It was 1943, and the Heuman family had already been severed from the comfortable life they had been living in Lippstadt, Germany. Margot Heuman was 14 when she and her family were deported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish “transit” ghetto in Czechoslovakia that was a way station - a cruel intermezzo - for those who would be sent to the death camps.