Anna Hájková om The Amazing Margot Heuman

The Amazing Margot Heuman: Queer kärlek under Förintelsen

Where are the stories of great queer love in the Shoah? There are almost none. Margot Heuman was the first, and will most probably remain the only lesbian Holocaust survivor who bore testimony. As a German Jewish teenager, she survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen Belsen. One of the reasons of Heuman’s survival was her girlfriend, a Viennese Jewish girl named Dita. At liberation in Belsen, Heuman fell very ill and spent the next year in Sweden recovering. She always maintained a close connection to the country.

Hájková frames her interviews with Margot Heuman into on extensive archival research, explains why the history of same-sex desire in the Shoah has been excluded and marginalized, and how its return to our understanding of the Holocaust can offer an inclusive history of this genocide.

Dr Anna Hájková is Reader of modern European continental history at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of, among others, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (2020) and People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (2025). Hájková is the pioneer of queer Holocaust history.

The lecture is held in English.