Eva Baumohl papers

Eva Baumohl was born Eva Reinhold in Berlin in 1920 to Abisch Rheinhold (b. 1876) and Esther Winter (b. 1895). She had seven siblings: Oskar, Regina, Heini, Lina, Erna, Edith, and Max. The first four moved to Palestine during the 1930s. In the summer of 1938, Eva moved to Antwerp to live with her married sister, Erna; her mother and sister, Edith, joined them the following year; and Esther and Edith moved to Palestine in 1940. During the so‐called Polenaktion of October 1938, Abisch and Max were expelled into Zbąszyń and ended up in Krakow. They are believed to have been shot and killed in 1943. During the German invasion of Belgium, Eva and Erna fled to France but were forced to return to Antwerp. Erna’s husband, Benjamin Riemer, disappeared in a raid in Brussels while trying to arrange for a smuggler to take them to Portugal and is presumed killed. Eva and Erna were arrested in August 1943, taken to the transit camp at Malines, and in January 1944 deported to Auschwitz, where they were eventually assigned to the “Union” munitions factory for night shift work. They were forced on a death march to Ravensbrück in January 1945, transferred to Neustadt‐Glewe in March, and liberated in May. They returned to Brussels, where Erna was reunited with her young daughter. Eva met her future husband, Naftali Baumohl (d. 1996), at a friend’s wedding in September 1945, and they were married in July 1946. They moved to Antwerp and had children Bernard and Helen. The Baumohl family moved to Canada in July 1951 and immigrated to America in July 1953, settling in New York City. The Eva Baumohl papers consist of biographical materials, correspondence, personal narratives, and photographs documenting Eva Baumohl’s family in Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Antwerp; her father’s and brother’s expulsion into Poland in 1938; Eva’s survival in Auschwitz with her sister Erna; and her husband, Naftali Baumohl. Biographical materials include Eva’s wartime and postwar foreigner identification card in Belgium, her Belgian travel card for foreigners, and her son Bernard’s business card. Correspondence include letters and postcards among Eva Baumohl, her parents, and her siblings in Berlin, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and Krakow. The correspondence documents daily prewar life, her siblings’ and mother’s migration to Palestine, her father’s and brother’s expulsion into Zbąszyń and their neediness there, and the family’s continued efforts to emigrate from Europe and be reunited. Many of the letters and postcards are accompanied by Eva’s later annotations about the contents of the correspondence or the mood of the writers or recipients. Personal narratives consist of four accounts of Eva’s experiences as a refugee in Belgium, at Auschwitz, on a death march, at Ravensbrück and Neustadt‐Glewe, and after liberation. The narratives include an interview conducted by her granddaughter and a testimony prepared for the Shoah Foundation. Photographs depict Eva and Naftali Baumohl and Eva’s parents, brothers, and sisters before the war in Berlin and Belgium and after the war in Belgium.