Description:

Queering the Holocaust: The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman

Film Screening and Q&A with historian Anna Hájková (Warwick University)

Sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University

Margot Heuman (1928-2022) was a survivor of Theresienstadt ghetto, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen. She was also the first lesbian Holocaust survivor to record her oral history. The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman is based on transcripts of that recording. It dramatizes the interactions between Margot Heuman and Anna Hájková, the Warwick University historian who recorded their conversation in 2019. Directed by Erika Hughes, the play offers a poignant view of the coming of age of a Jewish queer woman in Nazi concentration camps. In the play, filmed at another location and screened now at Northwestern, Heuman reflects on love, choices, sexual violence and sexual barter, homophobia, and survival. Moving, funny, pragmatic, and original, Heuman’s testimony illustrates the many stories erased by homophobia and misogyny. “I am amazing,” Heuman tells her interviewer, reminding us she may remain the sole lesbian to speak about her experiences in the Holocaust.