By Donald H. Harrison
POWAY, California – Eva Schloss, 89, who has a powerful Holocaust survival story to tell about herself, knows that the world also hungers for details about her posthumous step-sister Anne Frank, the famous young girl diarist, whom she had known in Amsterdam before their respective families had gone into hiding from the Nazis.
Schloss’s mother and Anne Frank’s father were married after the Holocaust in which they both lost a spouse and children. The Nazis murdered Otto Frank’s wife Edith and two daughters Margot and Anne. They also murdered Elfriede Geiringer’s husband and son, Heinz, but her daughter Eva survived. By the time Otto Frank became Eva’s stepfather, Anne Frank had been dead nearly a decade.
Schloss spoke Tuesday, March 5, at Chabad of Poway at an event in which two young sisters, Rachael and Sarah Golembesky presented her with their family’s “Upstanders” crytal plaque award—an “upstander” being someone who by valorous action distinguishes himself or herself from “bystanders.” Jordan Marks, representing Mayor Kevin Faulconer of San Diego, presented resolutions making the day she spoke at Chabad to be Eva Schloss Day in San Diego as well as Holocaust Education Day in San Diego. A similar proclamation honoring Schloss was promulgated for the County of San Diego by Supervisor Diane Jacob, and commendations for the Holocaust survivor also were came from the City of Poway and the California Legislature by way of Assemblymember Brian Jones. Violinist Shea Kahane played in Schloss’s honor “Ani Ma’amin,” an anthem which Holocaust victims reportedly sang on their way to the gas chambers. The hymn says that the singer still believes in God, no matter how long He may tarry.
Schloss’s lecture was bracketed with comments about the Holocaust by Rabbis Mendel and Yisroel Goldstein, son and father. Internationally, Schloss has become a well-known lecturer on the Holocaust. Just a few days after she spoke in Poway, she met in a specially -arranged sensitivity training session in Orange County with teens who had been photographed playing beer pong with red cups that had been arranged in the shape of a large Nazi Swastika.
Interviewed on the Poway congregation’s stage by Marissa Moshkovitz, Schloss said her family moved from Vienna, Austria, to Amsterdam, Holland, shortly after Austrians voted for “Anschluss” with Nazi, Germany. She recalled that her brother Heinz was beaten up soon after the Nazis marched into Vienna, and that she, an elementary school pupil, was turned away at a neighbor’s door by the mother of her Catholic girlfriend, who told her they never wanted to see her again.
The mood in Amsterdam by contrast was quite welcoming, she recalled. “One day a little girl came to me and said, ‘You are new here,’ and introduced herself. Her name was Anne Frank, and we were both 11 years old. After school, we used to play together, skipping and hopscotch.” Eva said that while Anne was interested in girl things like clothing and hair styles, she (Eva) was more of a tomboy, enjoying biking and playing the game of rounders with the boys.
“When I told her that I had an older brother, she said, ‘When can I come and meet him?’” Whereas Anne had only an older sister, Eva “was not really interested in boys because they came in the house always. My brother was a wonderful musician, so he formed a little band, and there were always young boys around.”
“Anne with her big eyes—she looked at all those boys, and in her diary, of course, she writes a lot about certain boys which she liked and the boys that didn’t like her, or the other way around, and she was a big, big chatterbox,” Schloss recalled. “At school she had to stay behind very often to write 100 lines [saying] ‘I won’t talk so much in school’ and her nickname was ‘Mrs. Quackquack.’ Anne had an older sister, but Anna went to a Montessori school, meaning smaller classes and more attention for the children, so obviously her father must have realized that she needed some special attention.”
Matters changed dramatically for Anne and Eva and their respective families after Holland capitulated to the invading Nazi forces. “Slowly, slowly, the measures against the Jewish people started to arrive. At first, it was more a nuisance, but it was not life-threatening, like we were not allowed on public transport; we had to hand in our bicycles; we were not allowed to go out after 8 o’clock in the evening. Then we were not allowed to mix with non-Jewish people. We had to go shopping in only Jewish shops which were not supplied very well. So, it became difficult, but still manageable. But then we had to leave our [public] schools and go to Jewish schools…. The Germans knew there were lots of young Jewish people there and they came there with trucks, went into several classes and told the children to get into the trucks. In the evening, the parents waited for the children to take them home, but they never turned up.”
In June 1942, the Nazis announced that they wanted 10,000 young people aged 16 and over to report to the train station for transport to work in German factories. “Many parents were suspicious. At that time we knew about the many camps in Germany and Poland, and that many people had disappeared. So, why do they invite Jewish people to come back?” In that Eva’s brother Heinz was 16, and Anna’s sister Margot also was 16, both families made the decision independently to go into hiding. Whereas the Frank family stayed together in a secret annex in the building where Otto Frank had his business, the Schloss family decided to split up—the father and son to stay in one hiding place, the mother and daughter in another, so that chances would be increased that at least two of them would survive.
At this point, Schloss’s story departed from that of Anne Frank, whom she never saw again. Eva and her mother moved seven times, but they were arrested as a result of the treachery of a Dutch woman, who had witnessed Eva and her mother visit Eva’s father and brother at a hiding place that was close to theirs. Eva, at the time was 15 years old. Interrogated by the Gestapo, “I lost my speech and didn’t say anything. They started to beat me up, and they said they would kill my brother if I didn’t talk,” as it turned out an empty threat. “Eventually, they let me go, threw me in a little room, and there was my father, my mother and my brother.”
With approximately 80 other people, they were crammed into a box car, which was hot and had very little air. “We traveled 3-4 days, the only good thing [being] we were together as a family. … After a terrible journey, the train stopped for good, a lot of shouting and dogs barking, and Raus! Raus! [Out! Out!}, and it was high and we had to jump down, and we were in Auschwitz. We knew what that meant because the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] had sent out news to all the occupied countries…They mentioned the 300 death camps in Germany and Poland, and Auschwitz was always mentioned as the biggest, and that people were being gassed – how scary that was!”
Men and women were separated, and “people started to cling to their husbands, their children, crying, holding onto each other, a terrible, terrible scene because people assumed they would never see each other again. My father was not a religious man, but he took me by the hand, very serious, and said, ‘God will protect you!’ It was a farewell greeting. … Then in rows of five, the first selection took place. Dr. [Josef] Mengele was a proper medical doctor, not to cure people but to decide who was going to die and who was going to live. He came smartly dressed, polished boots, a little baton like a conductor, and he looked at you just a fraction of a second, and decided this side or that side. All the children were immediately taken away. If a mother had a baby in her arms, she had to give it to an older person [who was being sent to the gas chambers.]”
Schloss said she survived the selection because her mother had given her a coat, with a big rim. “When Mengelee looked at me, he didn’t realize how young I was.” The coat was taken from her at her next stop, a huge barracks, where all the women were forced to stand naked with “young SS boys poking fun at us.” Thereafter, “we were all tattooed with a number, and told you are not like human beings, you are like cattle and if ever we want you, we will call you out by your number, not by your name. Then all our hair was shaved, and while this was going on, this unbelievable cruelty, with laughing, [guards told them] ‘the family you have been separated from, they were taken directly to a shower, but it wasn’t a shower. No water came, but gas. When you go outside, you can smell it. They have all been killed and they are burning now.’ Can you imagine how I must have felt?”
In the barracks of Birkenau (Auschwitz’s companion camp for women), “every day was the same. There was no Shabbat, no Sunday, and we didn’t know what day of the week it was, or what month; only the season.” They did get to take a real shower once a week in an unsuccessful fight against lice, and one time when they came out of the shower, “there stood Mengele with some of his SS people and the selection was taking place. … We had to parade naked in front of him, and I passed, and my mother followed, and he looked her over again. As any mother would do, she had given me some of her food ration. She was a very tall lady, and she had become quite thin, and with a shaved head, we didn’t look very attractive. Mengele made her turn around again, and she was selected to be gassed. … I ran to her to say goodbye, and they beat me up with a big stick, they would not even let me say goodbye to her.” However, in a miracle which Schloss said people could read about in a book her mother wrote in 1988, her mother was able to survive. On another day, a kapo [Jewish prison assistant to the Nazi guards] told her someone was waiting for her outside her barracks, and “I figured it was my end” but “there stood my father. He looked very pale, with a big smile on his face. He asked me how is Muti [mother] and I told her that she had been selected. My father’s face crumpled in front of my eyes.” Her father visited her three more times, and then “I never saw him again.”
At last came liberation, when the “Germans started to be very nervous, and many guards disappeared. The gates were opened, we could have gone out really, but we were weak. We didn’t have proper clothes in the snow, so we stayed.” Then Dutch people who were in a different part of the camp told her that they had seen her mother. “I didn’t believe it; I thought that they just wanted to cheer me up, but it was true. She was saved!”
Together Eve and her mother went to the main camp at Auschwitz to see if they could locate her brother and father, even though there was still fighting in the area. “I saw a person who looked familiar. I said, ‘I think I know you,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I am Otto Frank, Anne’s father. Have you seen my girls or my wife?’ But I hadn’t seen them. The camps were enormous. But he had seen my father and brother, and so I had great hope that the war would soon end and we would be together again.”
The Russian liberators transported the survivors to Odessa, Ukraine, to wait out the war. Eventually a New Zealand troop transport ship took them to Holland, where they were dropped off. “We thought there would be a welcoming committee, but there was nothing.” She said the Germans had stolen everything from the Dutch people, including their food. “Ten thousand Dutch people were found dead in their apartments, and there were no cats or dogs, they were all eaten.”
Eventually, families received notification from the Red Cross of those who had died. Eva’s father and brother had died in Mauthausen several days before the camp was liberated by the Americans. Otto Frank learned that his wife had died in Auschwitz, and his daughters in Bergen-Belsen.
“A few days later, he came again with a brown parcel under his arm. He opened it very carefully, and he said ‘I must show you something,’ and you can guess what it was. It was Anne’s diary. He said, ‘Can I read a little bit out of it?’ and he read a couple of sentences and he always burst into tears. It took him three weeks to read it, and he used to say, ‘I didn’t know my own child.’ He knew that she was writing a diary but he had no idea what she was writing. And he was very, very proud and he showed it to everybody, and people said to him, ‘You know this is a very valuable document, you really should publish it.’ But a diary is very personal, and Anne didn’t get along with her mother, and she writes unpleasant things about her mother and so he was very dubious to publish it. But eventually he realized he should do it.”
Schloss said whereas she was filled with hate following the Holocaust, “he who lost his whole family had no hatred …. He said, ‘If you go through your life hating people, the people you hate don’t know, they don’t suffer, but you will suffer.’ That was true.
“I was very miserable. I didn’t want to go to school, but Otto told my mother she has to force me to go back to school. I felt I was already an adult. But I did go back to school and when I finished my schooling, I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my life. Otto and my mother decided I should become a photographer… Otto was a good photographer. He took many good photos of his children. He had a Leica, a very good camera, and he gave it to me, and said I hope you will become a good photographer. But I was very miserable in Amsterdam. Otto knew someone in London who had a photographic studio and he got me a job there for a year.”
While in London, she met Zvi Schloss, who was a German refugee with family in Israel. Zvi proposed marriage, but Eva at first declined. Then Otto came to visit her, saying that he and her mother were planning to get married. “I went back to this young man and said ‘You can marry me now’ and we went back to Amsterdam, because we didn’t like anyone in London [where they had been berated as “dirty foreigners.’] Eva and Zvi were married for 62 years prior to his death. They had three daughters and five grandchildren.
Schloss said that if her brother had lived, he would have contributed much to the world. As it was, he had left behind 200 poems, “most of them very sad; he was very afraid of dying.” He also left behind a number of paintings that he had hidden under the floor boards of a hiding place. Schloss said she donated them to the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam. She recalled that Heinz once asked their father what happens to people after they die. Their father told him, “Your body will disintegrate and if you have children, you will live on in your children.” Heinz persisted, “What if I die before I have children?” Their father responded, “Well, we are all a link in a chain that goes from generation to generation. Nothing gets forever lost. Somebody will remember even if you have a short life what you have done.” Schloss said in one of her books, she made certain that Heinz was indeed remembered. “He was really an amazing young artist, taught himself six languages, played chess with himself—not with a computer, and used his time amazingly.”
She concluded her lecture saying, “We must educate our young people to speak up when we see injustice being done. This is the only chance to change the world, to make it a safer and better place for everybody.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com