“Being together with Dita - We did it together. [...] Neither of us would have survived without the other, and we both realize that.”⠀⠀

Margot Heuman was born in Hellenthal, Germany in 1929. In 1942, she and her family were sent to Theresienstadt ghetto, where Margot and her sister were put into a youth home. ⠀

In Theresienstadt ghetto, the Holocaust historian Dr. Anna Hájková has shown, teenage Margot Heuman(n) entered a romantic relationship with a girl named Dita. After being deported to Auschwitz and Neuengamme, Margot and Dita continued their romance in the camps, and survived together. ⠀

When Margot Heuman(n) told us her story in 1994, she was not able to tell her whole story, for reasons having to do with personal preferences or interviewer lines of questioning. ⠀

More than two decades later, Margot decided to come out to her family. Between 2017 and 2022, she shared her story with Anna Hájková, who has written about Margot Heuman extensively, and even wrote a theater play together with Erika Hughes.⠀

Thanks to Hájková’s work, we can now understand the traces of queer love in Margot’s early testimony.⠀

Margot and Dita remained close until Dita’s passing in 2011. Margot passed away in May 2022.⠀

In our Visual History Archive, which contains over 55,000 testimonies, only ~10 interviewees openly identify as queer in their interviews.