Eva Schwebel

* 1951

  • "That was hard. What was that... Actually, the Jewish community - not the Jewish community, but several people from the Jewish community - took me as a 'réfugié', as in charge, let's say. So they did the best they could. That is, then there were two ladies, two old ladies, who took care of one dormitory of the university. And they started to take care of me for real. But it was very hard too, because they used to invite me to their house for dinner every Shabbat. I was lost, it was... They were very good to me, but it was a different world. It was a different world for me! And what kept me alive, I think, was that they put me in a Jewish school, a private school. To continue my studies. Right from September, right away, so they did what they could. Because the 21st was what it was, and I was already in school on the 1st of September. That means that they also took care of me." - "And that was a Jewish school? Jewish high school?" - "A Jewish school that went from young to graduation. So, after all, they did actions for my benefit. I have to say that." - "The parents of the..." - "Not the parents, the two old ladies. So they didn't let me sit around and do nothing, they took care of me. So I went in September, I started my senior year right away. Can you imagine that? If I don't speak French - a little. In a Jewish religious school, with people I had never seen, never heard of. A principal who was a great scholar in Judaism, very religious... I don't know how I survived it all in the end. I admire myself, maybe for the first time I admire myself - it has to be published."

  • "My relationship with Slovakia was very difficult when I lived there. Of course, it was never talked about. That is, I was - after what I knew from my mother, what little I knew - it meant that I was... I am Slovak, I was born there, but I had, in a sense - it's not said either - but certainly when I was a child I hated the Slovaks. Because I was aware that what they did, what they did to my mother, what they did to the Jews... I didn't know the whole history. I'm only now discovering, these last years, the facts and so on. As a kid, I only knew what my mother told me. It wasn't taught in schools, it wasn't talked about. And now I'll try to answer your question: it wasn't talked about at all. Not among children at all, maybe it was talked about in families among Jews. But for the majority... for the majority society to ever talk about it - after all, it came only, I don't know, twenty or thirty years after I left, didn't it?"

  • "I have such memories of grey streets, everything was grey in our country, the houses, the streets. Then, as I told you - that inner fear that was not visible on the outside, but was always inside me. But what was fortunate: that my mother had many friends. My mother and father didn't get along very well, as I said before, so my mother was always dragging me to her friends. That was mostly a lot of Christian friends - even Jewish families. So I wasn't alone, I had good friends and I was always the best student, that was a must. My mom was a little difficult, she was a difficult person. I don't know what she was like before the war, but after what she went through, it was hard. She was very demanding." - "You mean demanding in the sense that she made a lot of demands on you?" - "Very big demands. And I could never really satisfy them. That was a little difficult. Because I don't think anything could have satisfied my mom after what she went through. So it was a bit of a lonely childhood, I was quite isolated. Isolated and not isolated. Because I was a bit lonely at home, but I had good friends in the community."

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    Praha, 04.01.2024

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Her mother prepared her for the possibility of exile from an early age, and at seventeen she was left alone in France.

Eva Schwebel (Zipser) in 1968
Eva Schwebel (Zipser) in 1968
photo: Archive of the witness

Eva Schwebel comes from the second generation of Holocaust survivors. Both of her parents were Jewish. While her father, Alexander Zipser, hid in Slovakia during the war, her mother, Aranka Neumann, was deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis in one of the first transports of Slovak Jews. She survived in this extermination camp for two and a half years before being rescued by transport to the labour camp in Trutnov. Both Alexander and Aranka lost their entire families during the Holocaust. They were married in 1949 in Košice, and their only daughter Eva was born on August 18, 1951. Her childhood was influenced by her parents’ ever-present fear and their wariness of the majority society, which did not allow reflection on the Holocaust. In the summer of 1968, seventeen-year-old Eva went to France at the invitation of a friend and decided to stay in Strasbourg after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Her host family placed her in a Jewish boarding school, and Eva entered her senior year at a very pious private Jewish school. After a successful graduation, she continued her studies at university and in 1971 married a Frenchman of Tunisian-Jewish descent named Alain. However, he tragically died two years later, when Eva was seven months pregnant. Eva gave birth to a son, Gabriel, and her parents legally came to Strasbourg to visit her permanently. In addition to caring for her son, she found a new meaning in life working for the Council of Europe. In 1984, she married for the second time and had a daughter, Léa, with her husband Henri Schwebel. She followed her second husband to Paris, where she then worked for the Council of Europe Development Bank. She retired in 2011 and started learning Hebrew. She published an autobiographical book, Don’t Come Back.