On December 6, 1941, two days before the second mass murder committed in Rumbula, Eva Hoff, her five-year-old daughter Marina and two-year-old son Leonard managed to escape from the Riga Ghetto.
According to Marģers Vestermanis:
Hoff found short-lived shelter at the Orthodox women’s monastery in the Moskauer Vorstadt and later with Father Tom in the basement of St Albert's Church.
The Capuchin friar Tom, born in a noble Austrian family as Karl von Gumppenberg, had naturalized as a Latvian citizen not long before the war and, since 1939, was appointed head of a monastery in Riga. Father Tom helped to arrange for shelter for Eva Hoff and her children. Until the spring of 1942, Hoff temporarily hid with a string of acquaintances before finding more permanent shelter with Anna and Georgs Celmraugs, but on February 24, 1944 she was nevertheless arrested.
At the moment of her arrest, she claimed that she was of German and her children of half-German descent and announced that she was going to apply for documents that would prove her “Aryan blood”. Together with her children, Eva Hoff was incarcerated in the “Jewish women’s” crowded common cell and was kept in prison until the spring of 1944.
At the end of May, as a "person with obscure origins", Hoff was transferred, along with her children, to the Salaspils Concentration Camp where she was imprisoned until August 12, 1944 when she was again transferred – this time to Stutthof, in Germany.
Eva Hoff survived and ended up in Sweden, but she was separated from her children for a long time. The Soviet regime refused to allow the children to travel to a “capitalist country”. Only owing to the connections of the wife of the well-known cultural figure Boris Shalfeyev, the children were finally allowed to join their mother in Sweden.
Father Tom was arrested in 1945 and accused of anti-Communist agitation. In December 1946 he was sentenced to 10 years in labor camps in Russia. After returning from the camps in 1955, Father Tom continued to serve as a diocese priest in Brukna.
