Eva Koepsell (F / Hungary, 1944), Holocaust survivor

Eva Koepsell (F / Hungary, 1944), Holocaust survivor

• KEYWORDS : <Hidden Children> -- <United States>

Biography

Eva Koepsell was born in 1944 in Budapest, Hungary. Her mother left her at a Red Cross nursery where many babies were saved. She emigrated to the United States in 1947.

USHMM Oral History Collection

Eva Koepsell, born in 1944 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her father, who was a physicist, and her mother, who was a social worker (she shows pictures of her family from 1906); how she doesn’t have many memories from the war but learned about her family’s experience later; her mother losing her job in 1941; her father working until he lost his job in 1943 and was taken to a forced-labor camp; her family living in cellars first in the Jewish ghetto; her aunt’s baby dying from lack of food; another aunt being taken in 1944 to Auschwitz, where she survived medical experiments but then could not have children; her mother converting to Catholicism and hiding; her mother leaving her at a Red Cross nursery where many babies were saved; going to the United States in 1947 when she was three and a half years old; her mother being very much affected by the events and her efforts to distance herself from her experience; her father escaping from the forced-labor camp after a few months; her father working as a physicist in the US; living in the Bronx and having relatives in Brooklyn and Queens; moving later on to Buffalo, NY; going to a Catholic school in the Bronx at age 12; learning about her own Jewish background, of which she is proud; her father dying and her mother returning to Hungary to stay with one of her sisters; the importance of telling her story; poems she wrote about the conditions during the war (which she reads); and the importance of recognizing what is going on and that more people should have acted during the war.