Eva Ostwalt papers

Eva Ostwalt (1902-2010) was born in Cologne, Germany to Emil Lippmann and Else Ballin Lippmann. Eva had two younger sisters, Kate and Trude. Although their family was Jewish, they had assimilated to the German community in Cologne. Emil belonged to the board of the Cologne Conservatory, and played cello in the Cologne orchestra. Karl Hesse, a new cellist, was introduced to Emil and consequently to Eva, and the two fell in love. Despite her parent’s wishes to marry someone Jewish, the couple wed anyway, and gave birth to a daughter, Heidemarie, in 1925. Karl got a solo cellist position in Dresden, and the family moved in 1927. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism began to spread throughout Germany. Trude and her husband immigrated to Palestine in 1935, and Kate immigrated to the United States in 1939. Their father, Emil, died in 1938. Eva and Karl divorced, partially due to Karl potentially losing his position due to his marriage to a Jew. Eva was awarded custody of Heidemarie, and the two moved to Merano, Italy, where they lived until 1938 when Eva’s passport expired and she was forced to return to Germany. Believing that Heidemarie would be safer with her father, Eva gave custody back to Karl in Dresden. Eva returned to Cologne, where both she and her mother Else were eventually caught by the SS. Else was sent to Auschwitz, where she would be killed. Eva was sent to Ravensbrück. Eva arrived at Ravensbrück in 1943 and remained there until the end of the war. While at Ravensbrück, she received letters from her daughter. She was first forced into hard labor, and eventually knitted socks for SS officers, before working at the nearby Siemens production factory. When the guards left them alone, the prisoners would exchange recipes, and Eva would copy recipes onto scraps of paper that she found within the factory. She eventually had enough recipes to make a crude recipe book. Near the end of the war, she was taken on a death march, where she escaped on the second night. She was eventually picked up by a man near the highway who took her to the hospital in Malchow on May 2nd, 1945. She was released August 3rd, and wished to see her daughter in Dresden. She arrived to find the town in ruin from air raids, and learned that her daughter had died from the attacks. Eva would stay with cousins and relatives for the next two years in Wurzburg and Munich. She met Harry Guttsmann, whom she would later marry. The two immigrated to the United States in 1947, and became American citizens in 1953. The couple decided to change their last name to Ostwalt (Harry’s mother’s maiden name) so others could pronounce it more easily.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Eva Guttsmann Ostwalt

Funding Note: The accessibility of this collection was made possible by the generous donors to our crowdfunded Save Their Stories campaign.

The Eva Ostwalt papers were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2008 by Eva Ostwalt.