Eva Brigitte Marum

   
Landesbildstelle Baden   Under SA guard, a group of leading Socialists arrives at the Kislau camp, one of the early concentration camps. Local Social Democratic party leader Ludwig Marum is fourth from the left in the line of arrivals. Kislau, Germany, May 16, 1933.
See photograph

Eva Brigitte was the youngest of three children born to German-Jewish parents in the capital of Baden, a state along the Rhine River in southwestern Germany. Known as Brigitte by her friends and classmates, and as "Brix" by her family, she grew up in a secular household and attended public schools. Her father was a local Social Democratic party leader.

1933-39: In 1933 the Nazis came to the Marum's house and arrested Eva's father because he was an active anti-Nazi. Two months later she suddenly saw him "paraded" through the streets in an open truck, being publicly humiliated on his way to a concentration camp. After that Eva refused to remain in school. After her father was killed, she and her mother emigrated to France in April 1934.

1940-43: The French released Eva from an internment camp for enemy aliens, but the situation worsened when the Germans defeated France in 1940. In 1941 Eva's sister obtained steamship tickets and exit visas to America for herself, Eva, and their mother, but as Eva was nine months pregnant the ship officials would not let her board. Alone, and abandoned by the baby's father, Eva gave birth in Marseille. Unable to provide for her son, she placed him in a home for refugee Jewish children in Limoges when he was a year old.

Caught in a roundup in southern France in January 1943, Brigitte was deported to Sobibor, where she perished. Her son survived and was taken to Palestine in 1945.

Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Citations