Eva Brown

1938 - 2022

Eva Metzger Brown

Amherst, MA — Eva Metzger Brown, 83, passed away on May 16, 2022.

Born in Fürth, Germany, on July 13, 1938, Eva was the only child of Doris (Bamberger) and Ernest Metzger. On November 9, 1938, the new parents found themselves huddling in terror in the stairway of their apartment building, cradling infant Eva, as Nazis vandalized their home in what became known as Kristallnacht.

That event set in motion a harrowing three-year journey of displacement, fear, trauma and injury, as the family fled Germany, first arriving in Paris, then Angers, Marseille, and Casablanca. Along the way, Eva sustained shrapnel injuries from a German bombing that took her mother's leg. She endured prolonged separation from her hospitalized mother and interned father while she was housed in a Catholic orphanage in France. When the family finally reached safe haven in New York on August 6, 1941, Eva was just 3 years old. She spoke a little French and German, but no English.

The family settled in Forest Hills, Queens, and began to rebuild their lives. Eva was intelligent and determined and excelled at school. She attended Forest Hills High School, and then Cornell University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1960.

In 1961, she married the love of her life, Norman Brown, whom she met in 1956 at Pine Trail summer camp. They had been married nearly 61 years at the time of her death.

Eva cherished education and continually talked about its importance with her children and grandchildren. She earned a PhD in clinical psychology at Columbia University – a feat she accomplished while also giving birth to two children. She was pregnant with a third at her graduation in 1967.

Eva completed her postdoctoral work at The Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and then started her own practice as a psychotherapist in Amherst, where she and Norman and their children settled in 1970. Her practice focused on the trauma areas of divorce and the restructuring of family relationships post-divorce. An innovator in her work, she established a divorce mediation consultative practice with a lawyer colleague – the first such collaboration in western Massachusetts.

After years of silence, Eva began to finally process and share her own Holocaust experience as a child survivor. She began to share her story with other survivors and helped them to heal by breaking their silence and sharing their own stories. In the 1980s, she founded and directed the project, Intergenerational Healing in Holocaust Families, at the University of Massachusetts.

She facilitated intergenerational groups at the yearly meetings of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust. Her scholarly writings focused on her understanding of therapy and the psychotherapeutic development of trust so that Holocaust silences, treatment and intergenerational issues could be better understood, as well as how those lessons and strategies could inform treatment of other traumatized groups. In 2009, the International Psychoanalytical Association awarded Eva the Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide.

Eva's Holocaust experience informed her understanding of threats of genocide throughout the world. She shared her Holocaust story in public schools, colleges and synagogues, drawing connections between the Holocaust and current existential threats. Eva and Norman established the "Metzger Brown Holocaust Remembrance Award" at Amherst Regional High School in honor of her parents. It is awarded to a senior who has written the best essay on the topic: Lessons from the Holocaust and their implications for present day genocides.

Eva was a lifelong learner whose interest in and commitment to Judaism grew as she got older. She and Norman were formative members of the Jewish Community of Amherst, and when Eva was in her early 50s, she became a bat mitzvah with four generations of her family proudly in attendance.

Despite the profound challenges she faced in her life – her Holocaust nightmare, her mental health struggles in young adulthood and middle age, and the dementia that slowly robbed her of memory and cognition throughout the last decade of her life – Eva always maintained a joyful outlook and was a pleasure to be around. Her long life truly brought her many blessings, including loving extended family, devoted friends, world travel, annual beach vacations in Westport, Massachusetts, seeing grandchildren grow into adulthood, and even the chance to spend time with her first great grandchild.

Eva is survived by her husband, Norman Brown; her children David (Deborah) Brown of Lexington, Carolyn (Paul) Mitchell of Bolton, and Michael Brown (Elya Rowa) of Amherst; her grandchildren Alejandro Brown, Jacob Brown, Sally Brown, Ernesto Brown, Samuel Mitchell, Camila Brown, and Maxwell Mitchell; and her great grandson, Jaylin Pina-Brown. Services were private. Donations in Eva's memory may be made to the Jewish Community of Amherst General Fund (jcamherst.org).