“Because of my caring for another human being,” Ms. But Margot and Dita survived, chosen inexplicably for transport to various camps and eventually ending up in a labor camp in Hamburg. Her mother, Johanna, and her younger sister, Lore, would perish later in the camp at Stutthof. Dita and her family were sent a month later. When in 1944 her father was caught stealing food, he and the family were sent to Auschwitz. Margot saw her first opera there, “La Bohème,” and she fell in love, with a Viennese girl named Dita Neumann.
The proscriptions that followed Kristallnacht curtailed Jewish life at home, but Theresienstadt had culture, school and community. It was 1943, and the Heuman family had already been severed from the comfortable life they had been living in Lippstadt, Germany. Margot Heuman was 14 when she and her family were deported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish “transit” ghetto in Czechoslovakia that was a way station - a cruel intermezzo - for those who would be sent to the death camps.
