„I judge people by who they are not how they were born.“

Stáhnout obrázek
MUDr. Eva Vaňousová, born Neumannová, was born on 8th October 1926 in Prague into a Jewish family. Shortly before the war her parents let Eva and her sister Jiřina be baptized because they thought it would save them from Nazi persecution. They also wanted to send their daughters to England (they probably heard about the transports of Sir Nicholas Winton). Eva Vaňousová was not allowed to finish her grammar school studies due to her Jewish origin and for some time followed with private studies, as many other Jewish children did. In 1943, the whole family was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto. She spent about a year there and on the day of her 18th birthday, was transported to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, following her father. Her mother and sister were selected to gas chambers right after the arrival to the camp. Eva spent a few weeks in Auschwitz and then sent to a labor camp in Merzdorf in North Moravia. She didn‘t know anything about her father and she thought that he didn‘t survive Auschwitz. They met after the war. Despite his congenital cardiac disorder her father survived one of the death marches. Somewhere in Germany two women took care of him and he fully recovered. After the war Eva Vaňousová finished her grammar school studies and got a degree in medicine. She worked the whole life as an internist.