Margot Heuman
Margot Cecile Heumann (pronounced [hɔʏman] HOY-man; February 17, 1928 – May 11, 2022) was a German-born American Holocaust survivor.
In her youth home in the ghetto, Heuman met an Austrian girl named Ditha Neumann, and the two began a secret intimate relationship.
The group of women selected for forced labor were taken to Dessauer Ufer and later Neugraben and Tiefstack, all subcamps of Neuengamme concentration camp in the city of Hamburg.
After spending two years in Sweden and attending school, she moved to the United States, where she chose to stay because she was able to live openly as a lesbian.
She worked for an advertising agency in New York City, and in the early 1950s was in a relationship with New Yorker editor Lu Burke.
Heuman's life story was censored by multiple Holocaust-related archives, which initially described Neumann as her best friend rather than her romantic partner despite her frank discussion of their relationship.
Margot Cecile Heumann was born on February 17, 1928, in Hellenthal, German Reich,[1] close to the border of Belgium.
[3] Margot met an Austrian girl named Ditha Neumann[b] in the youth home,[4] and the two slept together and were intimate but did not have sex.
[3] The group, including Heumann and Neumann who were 16 years old at the time, were the first female prisoners to arrive in subcamps of Neuengamme.
[3][8] Both Heumann and Neumann engaged in sexual barter with men while at Neuengamme, obtaining food which they then shared with each other.
[1] In the early 1950s, the two were sometimes seen visiting lesbian bars in Greenwich Village together,[3] and Burke read the dictionary with Heuman to help her improve her English.
[1] Heuman attended the City College of New York, and in the early 1950s entered a job at Doyle Dane Bernbach.
[6] Eventually she reentered her career in advertising after hiring a black housekeeper, while also having an affair with a married woman who lived next door.
[6] In 2018, historian Anna Hájková visited her home and conducted an interview in which Heuman described her relationship with Neumann as a romantic one.
In an article about Heuman in Der Tagesspiegel, historian Anna Hájková wrote that it was "tragic that homophobic prejudice prevented a number of queer Jewish women who survived concentration camps from leaving testimonies of their lives", arguing that Heuman's story was even more important because of that fact.
