When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made his September appearance in Berlin’s Jewish Museum to mark the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement between West Germany and Israel, he spoke of a "miracle.” The miracle that in 1952, just seven years after the Shoah, the Federal Republic of Germany committed to paying reparations to the Jews.

Since then, Germany has paid out more than 80 billion euros to victims of the Nazis. "Today and in the future,” said Scholz, "it is a matter of utmost concern” for the government "to secure the ongoing reparations payments to aging Holocaust survivors.”

The speech had a dual message: We are ashamed of Auschwitz, but we are proud of our efforts at restitution.

At some point during the event, Eva Umlauf – a slender woman in a black skirt suit and wearing a Patek Philippe on her wrist – took the stage.

She had survived Auschwitz as a child. And she was likely added to the program as a symbol of reconciliation. Instead, though, she told the story of how her mother, who was in Auschwitz with her and gave birth to a second child in the camp, sent in application after application over the course of several decades, but never received any reparations.

"So, Mr. Chancellor, she was not part of this miracle that you speak of,” said Eva Umlauf.

The chancellor was sitting in the first row. She smiled at him.

Olaf Scholz smiled back.

Following this ceremony, I visited Eva Umlauf in her apartment in Munich. I wanted to know more about this Jewish woman who was uninterested in showing gratitude.

She lives alone in the Harlaching neighborhood, not far from the Isar River, in an apartment with a rocking horse, a mahogany grandfather clock, a number of Chagall prints on the walls and plenty of light. She used to live a few streets away with her three sons in a house built by her first husband. He survived Dachau only to die in a gymnastics accident in the basement.

She placed coffee and eclairs on the table and said: "Mr. Scholz and Mr. Lindner (eds. note: Germany’s Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who was also present at the event) practically patted each other on the back. It is important for such commemorations that contemporary witnesses also be there and they have to be fit for the stage. Apparently, they can no longer find anyone apart from me.”

She only just turned 80.

It took some time before Germany could hold stately ceremonies in connection with the Holocaust. In a survey conducted in the early 1950s, many West Germans still felt that war widows and those who had been pushed out of their homes in regions that no longer belonged to the Germans were more worthy of assistance than the Jews. During the Cold War, the Jews of Eastern Europe received nothing. Homosexuals, those who had been forcibly sterilized and the Sinti and Roma – all groups that the Nazis had also persecuted – went largely empty-handed.

Almost 4.5 million people sent in an application at the time. The German authorities rejected more than one in four.

But it also took quite some time before Eva Umlauf was ready to talk about Auschwitz.

She couldn’t even talk to her mother about Auschwitz. Her mother, she says, only ever spoke of the camp as if they were still there – in the barracks, on the roll-call square. She always started crying. "There’s no such thing as a former concentration camp prisoner,” says Eva Umlauf.

When the American miniseries "Holocaust” was broadcast on German television in the late 1970s, with Meryl Streep playing the good German, the two of them watched separately.

Eva Umlauf only began speaking about her family’s history a few years ago. She suffered a heart attack and then wrote a book. She has spoken in museums, to schoolchildren and in the Finance Ministry. Rarely does she refer to notes while speaking, and she always expresses gratitude for the invitation. She tends to focus more on the crime than on Germany’s reparation efforts, which makes a certain amount of sense given that people are more interested in the gas chambers than they are in the West German Federal Indemnification Law – more interested in dead Jews than in living Jews.

If Eva Umlauf then sometimes reprimands the world champions of restitution, as she did at the ceremony in the Jewish Museum, she doesn’t continue scolding, nor does she demand any compensation for her late mother. She simply smiles, as though her counterpart has a noodle stuck to their face.

In that regard, she is the perfect witness for this country.

And in a few years, she may be the last.

On one of the days over the past several months that I was able to spend with her, she put on her black bathrobe and went to wash her hair as her hairdresser waited in the bedroom.

She sleeps on a heating pad, surrounded by stacks of books and magazines, the red curtains patterned like wrapping paper. I counted five watches on her bedside table, including the Patek Philippe that she was wearing at the Jewish Museum.

On this particular day, January 25, she was in a surprisingly good mood. She was preparing for a trip to Auschwitz.

She handed me seven sheets of paper – her speech for the January 27 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – sat down at her dressing table at the window and nodded to herself in the mirror. Her stylist, hairdryer at the ready, began kneading her wavy, damp hair. "How would you like it today, doctor?”

"Let’s make it last until Easter!” she responded with a bright, frail laugh, being careful not to jiggle her head too much.

I sat down on the parquet floor to read her speech.

Eva Umlauf is a medical doctor. She used to have her own pediatric practice and continues to work today as a psychotherapist, receiving her patients at home in a small room across from her kitchen. They sit such that her patients gaze at a photo of her with Pope Francis, while she is looking at Nadja and Naomi, her granddaughters.

One time, I rang the doorbell at 3:56 p.m. instead of 4 p.m. and had to wait four minutes until she opened the door. I encountered a patient of hers in the stairwell. She said that she works with both Jews and non-Jews, everyone has their "emotional baggage.” You don’t just inherit a house and a bank account, she told me.

Her Auschwitz speech reminded me of our conversation about therapies. "I am thankful to be alive,” read the manuscript, but "sometimes, I also feel guilty for having survived.” The speech ended with the reflection that descendants of the victims and descendants of the perpetrators can only come to terms with the past together.

After her stylist finished drying her hair, she asked me what I thought of the speech.

The arm of her bathrobe had slid up and I could see the blue number, A-26959, that was tattooed on her lower left arm in November 1944.

Shortly before her second birthday.

I asked her: "Aren’t you ever enraged?”

The Black Bag

Concentration camp survivors have certain obligations in Germany. Eva Umlauf’s mother had the obligation of presenting her grievances and submitting her applications in a timely manner. In the early 1970s, a court lectured her on her "negligent delay” and referred to § 189 par. 3 line 1 of the West German Federal Indemnification Law.

She had submitted 18 documents, including a medical certificate citing "nervous disorders, ailments of the digestive tract as a consequence of time spent in a concentration camp.”

Sixteen years later, she wrote a letter to the relevant financial authorities:

"Until the present day, I have received no indemnification from any authority according to any legal paragraph,” she wrote in blue ink. "Please provide me with information as to what other options and groups are available so that I, too, can receive that to which I am entitled, because I feel that I have once again been treated unfairly by the decision of the German Bundestag.”

She wrote the letter at a time when the German state was paying compensation to millions of Germans who had been forced out of their homes in present-day Poland and Czechia as a result of the war, to other Germans who had lost their fortunes in the war, and to public servants who had lost their jobs as a result of the postwar de-Nazification campaign. In total, those groups had received more money that the victims of National Socialism.

Eva Umlauf’s mother never actually sent her letter to the financial authorities. She was already 64 years old and suffering from osteoporosis. Because she was no longer able to wear her support corset due to pain, she walked crooked. Seven years later, she died after suffering her third heart attack.

Eva Umlauf keeps this letter in a black briefcase that harkens back to the era of Germany’s postwar economic miracle – "like the one,” she says, "that Mr. Scholz always carries with him.” Conventional leather with two clasps that snap shut. She found the bag when she was clearing out her mother’s welfare apartment in Neuperlach, a district of Munich. It contained her correspondence with the Bavarian state compensation authority, a ruling by a regional court in Munich and a ruling from the Bavarian Higher Regional Court.

When her mother was still alive, Eva Umlauf ultimately stopped paying attention to this ongoing battle with German bureaucracy. "I told her, just stop. We’re never going to get the money. It’s dead.”

She had a pediatric practice, three sons and a dog. One time, she says, she asked her mother: Mama, what would you even want to do with the money if you received it?

Her mother responded: I want to buy new mattresses.

Three months before her death, her mother said she wanted a watch. An expensive watch for her birthday. This woman who never splurged for a taxi, even when she could hardly walk anymore, and never threw food away, wanted a gold watch. A Patek Philippe.

Her mother, she says, put on the watch right in the shop on swanky Residenzstrasse in downtown Munich. She then turned to her daughter and said: Eva, you just bought yourself a watch.

"Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess”

"The smaller children usually cried because of the strangeness of being undressed in this fashion, but when their mothers or members of the Special Detachment comforted them, they became calm and entered the gas chambers, playing or joking with one another and carrying their toys.

"I noticed the women who either guessed or knew what awaited them nevertheless found the courage to joke with the children to encourage them, despite the mortal terror visible in their own eyes.”

The train that took her and her parents to Auschwitz in fall 1944 stopped several times. The Red Army was advancing by the day. On the night of November 2, the train finally rolled through the camp gate. Eva Umlauf has never stopped thinking about that delay.

Just a few hours before the train arrived, the SS in Auschwitz had, on orders from Berlin, ceased gassing people with Zyklon B.

Eva Umlauf says she "has a thing for watches.” She owns 10 of them, maybe 12, she’s not totally sure. She likes hearing them all tick together, ticktock, ticktock.

She says she only dared submit an application for compensation in 2019. She doesn’t have any conscious memories of Auschwitz, but she, too, is a concentration camp survivor.

And as such, she has certain obligations in Germany.

She had to prove her neediness to the German state.

The income of Holocaust survivors who apply for indemnification may not be higher than the German government deems appropriate – a sum that the German Finance Ministry negotiates each year with the Jewish Claims Conference.

When Eva Umlauf submitted her application, at the age of 76, the income limit was $49,850 per year. But she was earning more than that from her practice. She received official notification in February 2020, just a few weeks after Frank-Walter Steinmeier had held a moving speech in Yad Vashem.

The German president had spoken of a "miracle of reconciliation.”

"The documents you have thus far submitted,” Eva Umlauf read in the notification, "demonstrate that your income exceeds the current limits set by the German government.”

The Sister

In January 1945, when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, Eva was two years old. Her father had been sent on a death march by the SS. Her mother, prisoner number A-26958, had to stay in Auschwitz for another five months. Eva had chickenpox, pneumonia and a curvature of the spine. Her mother was pregnant.

That spring, Nora was born.

Today, Nora lives in Deggendorf. Her identity card reads:
Eye color: blue
Date of birth: April 30, 1945
Place of birth: Auschwitz

She also became a doctor. When I visited Eva Umlauf last December, her sister joined us. She avoids the public eye, but she wanted to show me something.

In September, two days after the ceremony in the Jewish Museum, she also applied for compensation. She had set a copy of her application next to her coffee cup. Eleven pages, five sections.

Section 3, question 1: "Where were you persecuted?”

Answer: "When I was still in the womb.”

She was still waiting for her official notification, but she was in a good mood. She found it amusing that her older sister was now in such great demand by the powers that be that even the German finance minister had thanked her in writing for her appearance at the Jewish Museum.

Nora: "She’s getting all kinds of love letters these days, even from (Bavarian Governor Markus) Söder. She was awarded the Order of Merit. Söder wrote that he made sure of it personally. Personally! Markus.”

Eva: "Here is the letter from Lindner, awful stationary, Mr. Lindner has to save money. And this one is from Söder. When I took it out of my mailbox, I read Bavarian Governor’s Office. I thought they wanted me to go get vaccinated, or that it was campaign material. When I opened it in the evening, Julian said: Mama, Beate Uhse also received this Order of Merit!”

The two sisters were quite jovial that morning, as if they were speaking about annoying children who were somehow also kind of nice.

The Anger

She says she has never been angry with Olaf Scholz or Christian Lindner. When the Finance Ministry invited her to an event for the first time last June, she says she even felt flattered. She jumped in to replace an older survivor who had suffered a nervous breakdown.

She sees these appearances as her true duty. She wants to continue talking and telling people about her mother for as long as she can.

After I had met with her several times, I came to the conclusion that she had done it. She had managed to do what her mother was never able to: stand above it all, above the horrors of the Holocaust and above the commemorative hype of the present day.

We visited Dachau together, where she told a group of schoolchildren about her nightmares during her third pregnancy of infants being thrown into an open fire. Now, she says, she no longer has nightmares. As a child, she thought that all children had a blue number, and then she avoided wearing short sleeves for her entire life. Today, when people ask her about the tattoo, she says it’s a telephone number.

We were in the atrium of Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University – the site where Sophie and Hans Scholl of the White Rose distributed their final pamphlets – on the day when a hologram of Eva Umlauf was being presented. She had been filmed with two Epic-M Dragon stereoscopic cameras (like the ones used by Peter Jackson to make "The Hobbit”) for two days. Which means that for future generations, Eva Umlauf will be available in 2D and 3D – and thanks to artificial intelligence, it will even be possible to talk with her. For the filming, she had to answer almost a thousand questions about the Holocaust.

We went to Einstein, the Jewish restaurant next to the synagogue, where she enjoyed salmon under police protection. We went to a concert at the invitation of a Jewish conductor and listened to Marc Neikrug’s "Through Roses” – a masterpiece, during which I wanted to cover my ears, about a violinist at Auschwitz who was playing in the commandant’s garden as he saw the SS murdering his lover through a hedge of roses. When it was over, Eva Umlauf applauded, before then chatting with her friend about chestnut cake recipes.

Only once did it erupt out of her.

We were sitting at her living room table after she had finished packing her suitcase for Auschwitz – warm hat, warm shoes and gloves. She has been to the camp several times, with her children and for her book, but she is always cold in Auschwitz. And she always wears her mother’s Patek Philippe when she goes.

Suddenly, she said that she was getting old. "When you get old, it’s not just your knees that hurt,” she said. "Everything grows fragile, including your psyche. I used to be stronger. I had the strength to suppress things. Now, I have to protect myself. You know, I find it more and more difficult to put up with these old Germans. My age. One of them frequently invites me over for a meal, and then they sit there and talk about being driven from their homes after the war, how they suffered. None of them ever think to say why they were displaced or who started the two world wars. With their white hair and self-pity talking about all the things they can’t eat, I sit there and think to myself: What are you doing here? It keeps getting worse, and I protect myself by saying that I can’t make it, I have a migraine. I smell them. Just like they say they can smell Jews, I smell them too.”

Eva Umlauf has warm blue eyes. It was the only time that I saw them filled with anger.

The Granddaughter

Before the flight to Poland, she enjoyed a pilsner in the Munich airport.

The Auschwitz Museum had booked her a cattle-class ticket, seat 20 F, and she looked out the window for a long time, watching as they deiced the wing, before then falling asleep. In Krakow, she was welcomed by a medic with a bar of chocolate and a wheelchair. She was then driven along a dark, country road to Hotel Imperiale.

It is a four-star establishment in Oświęcim, the Polish town where Auschwitz is located, situated directly across from the main camp. The clocks at reception show the time in Warsaw, New York and Tel Aviv.

The Warsaw clock showed midnight as we arrived. She paused briefly in front of her room, wondering whether she should knock on Naomi’s door across the hall.

When Eva Umlauf was pregnant with her first son, her husband insisted that she give birth in the United States. He wanted their son to be a U.S. citizen from his very first day. Today, that son lives in New York and has two daughters. Naomi is 19. She studies literature and wears her hair in braids.

Naomi was jetlagged at breakfast, poking listlessly at her hotel scrambled eggs as photographers, camera operators and people from the museum greeted her grandmother.

Eva Umlauf tries to fly to America once a year. Naomi and her sister Nadja (who currently teaches children in Mombasa after earning a degree at Yale) are her only grandchildren. They don’t speak German, and Eva Umlauf has a hard time with English.

She gave Naomi one of her favorite watches, a Longines. The watch is older than Naomi. Eva Umlauf wore it when she was in her early 20s, at a time when her future husband was courting her and gave it to her as a present. Naomi wears it as jewelry.

"I can no longer wind it,” the granddaughter said over breakfast in Oświęcim.

"You have to have it repaired,” her grandmother replied.

Together, they went over to the Sauna, the name of the low, red brick building in Auschwitz where shoes, pacifiers, canes, were taken from the prisoners. Eva Umlauf stepped up to the lectern. In front of her were other survivors, members of the clergy, military commanders and the husband of the U.S. vice president.

She began her speech by saying: "Dear Naomi, my granddaughter, how wonderful for me that you are here today.”

On that day, she showed her granddaughter the remains of the barracks in Section B II e. They linked arms as they walked past chimneys, past the guard tower, past Josef Mengele’s laboratory. Fine flakes of snow were falling. And she was cold.

The Fear

Last November, Eva Umlauf was invited to a discussion panel in the town of Germering, just outside of Munich, with musical accompaniment. During the event, she voiced her concern with one of the songs played on that evening: "Wunder Gescheh’n,” by Nena. She finds Nena’s affinity for Germany’s "Querdenker” movement – a collection of often right-wing conspiracy theorists born out of opposition to measures implemented to quell the coronavirus pandemic – to be extremely problematic.

Sixteen days later, she received an email, sent by the head of a cultural association in Bavaria.

"Dear Dr. Umlauf, I listened to your address in Germering and am aghast! You speak of persecution and prejudice in your early childhood but interrupt your interview partner during your conversation to tell the audience that Nena is a "Querdenker” (??????). Who in heaven’s name cares and what does that have to do with your own biography? Have you ever stopped to consider that the persecution of the Jews was a product of precisely such astonishing claims? As a psychotherapist in particular, I find this claim so appalling due to the way in which you seek to discredit Nena just because she doesn’t believe everything that is being asserted. Nena would have hidden Jews, though I’m not sure about you. Disappointed in a person who values self-promotion above tolerance. With sad regards.”

In late February, we were sitting in a trattoria on the Isar River. I wanted to meet with Eva Umlauf one more time after Auschwitz, after all the commemorative speeches, to talk about her daily life between the big anniversaries.

We spoke for three hours about fear.

She said that she forwarded the email from Germering to the public prosecutors, but they responded that there was unfortunately nothing they could do since the woman from the cultural association hadn’t expressed her thoughts publicly.

She is worried about her sister in Deggendorf, where the extreme right-wing party AfD is receiving the most support of any town in Bavaria. She is happy that Naomi lives in New York.

She is afraid of another war, afraid for Ukraine, afraid that Zelenskyy might lose the war. She finds it strange that the Germans are making holograms at a time when bombs are falling on European cities.

She also, though, has a rather specific fear. "If Zelenskyy loses,” says Eva Umlauf, "people in Europe will say that the Jew pulled us into it.”

She ordered sole on this evening. A few days earlier, she had received the Order of Merit in Munich. I hadn’t been able to attend, so I asked how it was.

She said she had had her doubts for quite some time. Crosses remind her of the SS.

The laudator that evening, the Bavarian culture minister, said during the presentation: "Dear Ms. Umlauf, just as your prisoner number is indelibly stamped on your arm, your life story is stamped into our consciousness. It demonstrates, on the one hand, the worst that humans are capable of. But it also shows us that even after Auschwitz, a successful life is possible. That it is also possible to forgive.”

There is a recording of the speech. I asked Eva Umlauf when exactly she had expressed forgiveness. Who had she forgiven?

"Of course I haven’t forgiven,” she said. "Who am I to forgive on behalf of 6 million?”

But during the award ceremony for the Order of Merit, the program didn’t include a slot for her, the perfect witness, to speak.

She told me of a friend of hers, "no high school diploma, married well,” who once said that the Jews had become wealthy again because the Germans had paid so much compensation. The father of this friend, she said, had been a member of the Nazi party. Nevertheless, she didn’t break off the relationship.

"You can’t find any friends who don’t have a past,” she says.

She, too, has now begun receiving compensation for her time in Auschwitz – 600 euros per month. At some point she began treating fewer patients and fell below the income limit.