Born in Germany, Eva grew up as a refugee from Nazi Germany in Tianjin, China, where she lived through the turbulent years of the run-up to the Second World War, the Japanese occupation and the civil war that followed, until the Communist Revolution in 1949 decided the family to leave for the United States. They were evacuated by the US Navy and Eva entered college, while her parents, both physicians, requalified and resumed their profession.
 

She graduated from the University of Chicago with an AM in English, undertook studies for a PhD at New York University, and started a 47 year career teaching English in various colleges and universities in the US and abroad, lecturing in England, the Netherlands, China, Taiwan and Mauritius.

Eva retired in 2002 to take up NGO advocacy work at the United Nations and co-founded the NGO Committee on Migration at the UN in 2007, serving on its Executive Committee and the Executive Committees of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women and the UN Department of Public Information. She is a member of the NGO Committee on Human Rights, was a member of the Expert Working Group for Addressing Women’s Human Rights in the Global Compacts, has published several articles and has collaborated on various position papers and policy statements, particularly on issues of migrants and refugees, besides participating in many conferences around the world, including the Global Forum on Migration and Development on whose NGO Steering Committee she has served. She has two children and three grandchildren and lives in New York City.