Like every life, Eva Runde’s began with a strong woman. But she and her mother needed more strength than one can imagine: The mother, then 19 years old, gave birth to her daughter in a Slovakian labor camp in 1942. In a barrack at minus 20 degrees.

“I couldn’t be washed because the water froze immediately,” says Runde. Two years later, her family was deported to Auschwitz, where two-year-old Eva was also tattooed with her prisoner number. She fainted.

A delay saved her life

Their train had arrived at the extermination camp later than planned and therefore shortly after the gas chambers had been destroyed. to cover up the Nazi crimes from the advancing Red Army. Eva and her pregnant mother survived the Holocaust. The rest of the family – father, grandmother, aunts and uncles, great-grandparents – didn’t. Shortly after the liberation, her sister was born.

Eva grew up in Czechoslovakia, studied medicine, got married and went to Munich with her husband. She had three sons, ran a pediatric practice and trained as a psychotherapist.

“A wife doesn’t work.”

The delicate 83-year-old spoke to FOCUS editor-in-chief Franziska Reich on Friday evening at Burda Verlag’s Women’s Dinner on the occasion of International Women’s Day about how rocky this road was: circulation came to the country of the perpetrators, had to learn a new language and struggling to find a job as a woman.

The prevailing opinion at the time was: “A woman doesn’t work if her husband earns money and she has a small child. She has to flip the fish fingers in the pan herself and, ideally, grow organic carrots on the balcony.”

Suddenly she was on her own

Until her husband died unexpectedly, she had never written a transfer. Suddenly on her own, she knocked again on the door of the professor who had previously turned her away. “I told him, ‘You said if I have a husband who makes money, I don’t need a job. I don’t have a husband now.'”

Eva Rund got the job. And ultimately, she inevitably intertwines her work with what she calls her “emotional legacy”: Auschwitz as a traumatizing part of her biography, even if she has no personal memory of this place. The terror and loss remained ever present in her family.

“That’s exactly how it starts”

It is the current developments that motivated circulation to write her new book. It’s called “That’s How It Begins.” “I’m always loud – because this world is always unbearable. We have very difficult times politically, and we Jews have even more difficult times,” said Runde on Friday evening in Munich’s Maximilianeum, where the Bavarian state parliament usually meets.

She led the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 and the way the debate is being conducted about the Israeli reaction to it, as well as the rise of an undemocratic party in Germany. She no longer reads the “Jüdische Allgemeine” on the subway – out of concern about who is sitting next to her. She no longer wears the Star of David because she doesn’t want to be recognized: “I never imagined it would be like this again.”

When Chancellor Friedrich Merz pushed a tightening of asylum laws through the Bundestag with the votes of the AfD, she wrote him an open letter and warned: “In this way we are normalizing the enemies of our democracy.”

“You can always start again”

And yet circulation doesn’t seem despondent. When asked what we can do to prevent hatred from becoming part of everyday life again, she replied: “Everyone can do something. I, for example, go to schools and I tell the students that they have to know the past in order to be able to shape the future.”

What sentence would she give to a young woman growing into this society? “She should know what she wants, that she has to be assertive, that she shouldn’t be frightened if things don’t go as planned – you can always start from the beginning.”

Burda Verlag’s Women Dinner has been taking place since 2023. This year, more than 150 women from business, society, politics, culture, sport and fashion came together at the invitation of the Burda brands Bunte, Elle, Focus, Girlfriend, Harper’s Bazar and Instyle. These include politicians such as the Federal Minister for Research, Technology and Space, Dorothee Bär (CSU) and European Parliamentarian Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP), entrepreneurs such as Sara Nuru and Clarissa Käfer, actress Jutta Seidel and dressage rider Jessica von Bredow-Werndl.