Eva Roubickova (1921–2013)

Eva Roubíčková, née Mändelová, was born in Žatec, Czechoslovakia, to a family of German-speaking Jews. Her father, a veteran of World War I, was a professor of Latin and Greek. In 1938, anti-Semitism ran high in the town, which was in the Sudentenland region that Nazi Germany was seeking to annex (the so-called Munich crisis). Her family was forced to leave their comfortable home and and live in reduced circumstances in Prague. Their plan to emigrate in 1939 failed, and Eva was barred from attending school. In 1941, she and her whole family were deported to the ghetto-concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt). There she started doing farm work, which probably saved her from transportation east. The other members of her family were taken away on the last wave of transports in autumn 1944, and died at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Eva kept a diary of her experiences in the camp. She survived in Terezín to be liberated in May 1945. After returning to Prague, she was reunited with her fiancé, Richard Roubíček, who had served as a soldier in the Czech Army Abroad, and they got married and had two children. She worked from 1957 to 1975 as an administrative assistant for KOOSPOL, the government cooperative for agricultural foreign trade, and later as a private German teacher. Her diary was translated into English and published in 1998 as We're Alive and Life Goes On: A Theresienstadt Diary. It was finally published in Czech in 2009 as Terezínský deník. It is the only extant diary written by a survivor that covers virtually the entire time of the Terezín camp's existence.