Eva Schloss: Holocaust Survivor

[Steve Sheehan, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley]

And so, today, we have here to speak with you Eva Schloss. She was born in Austria. She migrated to Belgium and the Netherlands to escape the Nazi takeover of Austria. She settled in the Netherlands, and when she was in the Netherlands, she met Anne Frank.

She was arrested, Eva, on her 15th birthday and was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

Anne Frank didn’t survive Auschwitz, but Eva did.

Since 1985, Eva has dedicated herself to the subject of Holocaust education. She’s the author of three books. She’s done over a thousand speaking engagements, and she’s here to speak with us today. She also became Anne Frank’s stepsister, posthumously. Eva’s mother married Anne Frank’s father in 1953.

In addition to Eva, we also have Darryle Clott with us today. Darryle Clott is also a Holocaust educator, and she’ll be facilitating the discussion with Eva. Darryle has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from U.W.-La Crosse. She had a career as a public-school instructor in Minnesota, and then when she retired, she really went to work. She first developed an interest in the Holocaust, a professional interest, as a teacher in Minnesota. Since then, she’s studied with Holocaust scholars in Poland and in Israel. She directs workshops for other Holocaust educators, and she teaches The History of the Holocaust at Viterbo University.

So, without further ado, I’d like to welcome both of our speakers today, and if you could give me a hand in – in welcoming them on stage. Thank you.

[applause]

[Darryle Clott, Professor, Department of History, Viterbo University]

Eva let’s begin with the topic of Hitler. Anything – Anybody who knows anything about the Holocaust, I think, is always in shock that this man was able to gain the kind of power that he did. Could you talk a little bit about that, please?

[Eva Schloss, Holocaust Survivor]

Yes. Well, you know, we always puzzled about how men like Hitler, an uneducated Austrian, was able to get power in Germany, a very educated public, highly educated public. And to perhaps get a little bit of understanding, we have to really go back to the end of the First World War in 1918, which Germany, of course, was defeated and the Allied friends of France, England, and America put horrible conditions – peace conditions – onto Germany. And it was humiliating for Germany, and besides that, Germany became extremely poor, something you can’t imagine. There was an enormous inflation. There was starvation. People had to go with a wheelbarrow of paper money, which was practically worthless, to buy a loaf of bread, and the next day it was again much, much worse. About several million marks was one dollar.

And there was starvation, there was unemployment, and many governments, Weimar Republic was one, started to do something to improve situations, but nobody succeeded.

So, then came a man, and he said, Here’s a solution. He’s going to put things right. Well, people said, We have nothing to lose. Let’s give him a chance. And he got into power, and one of the things which everybody like was, you know, if there’s such poverty then, of course, as another party becomes very powerful and that is Communist. There were street fights in the streets in all big towns, Communists against Nazis, and the world, including America, England, the Church, Vatican, everybody was more afraid of Communism than of the National Socialist Party. That is really very, very important.

And so, people said, Well, let – Governments said, Let Hitler come to power. He’s going to fight Communism, which he – which he did. The first concentration camps were actually built for Communists.

So – and Hitler started to build autobahns, the motorways, was the first one in Europe. As well, he promised everybody would have a car, a well-known Volkswagen, a Beetle car for the people. And so, there was work, there was food, and things started to be better. So, people went along with him. There were even Jews who tried to join the National Socialist Party. Of course, very soon there were thrown out there. And to get more people to follow him, because not everybody followed of course, he became extremely anti-Semitic and said the fault of why we have been so – of why we lost the war and all that is because of the Jews.

And, again, people went along with this, and this is how the Holocaust started.

But, at first, Hitler didn’t want to get rid of, kill Jews, he just wanted to get rid of them. So, there were big negotiations with Eichmann, he was the one who came up with the Final Solution later. He went to Palestine to have conferences with the Mufti of Jerusalem. He was sort of the president – Mufti you called him. If they could ship all the German Jews, the Austrian Jews, to Palestine. But, of course, they didn’t want them. Then, they came up to send the Jews to Africa somewhere and all kinds of ideas, but no plan was really – really plausible. And so, then later, in 1941, they had a Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution. So – and this is really how the Holocaust came to be.

– You lived with your family. Your father Poppy, Pappy, and your mother who you call –

[Eva Schloss]

Mutti.

[Darryle Clott]

– Mutti, and your brother Heinz, had a happy family life in Vienna, and then you were forced to move to Brussels and then on to Amsterdam. Could you talk about those years, please?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, I was born in ’29, just when the Depression started, but Austria, of course, felt it as well. But nevertheless, we were a middle-class family. We had actually a very happy and good life. We had a big extended family with cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and I was a very sporty child. I liked outdoor life. I liked skiing in winter, mountaineering in summer, and in the – and in summer we went first always to Italy to the seaside. And it was really a beautiful life. I had an older brother. I should really have been the boy and he’s a girl.

[laughter]

I was a tomboy, and he was very, very gentle. He was an artist. At four years old, he could play already piano. He read books all the time, and at night he came into my room and told me all the stories he had read. So, for me was no need to learn to read, and I didn’t really want to read.

[laughter]

I read my first book, actually, when I was 13. And my parents always said that I’m a late developer, which I really was.

[laughter]

But in March 1938, the terrible thing happened. And the Nazis just marched into Austria. And the Jews were very, very scared because we knew what had happened in – in Germany already. And the Austrians overnight became ardent Nazis. It was amazing – amazing. All our best friends, Catholic people, suddenly stood in the street with the swastika flag with the Heil Hitler salute, and right away the next day, Jewish people were pulled out of their home, beaten up, their shops were looted, and overnight the whole atmosphere changed.

That was the first time I experienced anti-Semitism. In – in Germany and Austria, you had to have religious education. So, Austria was a Catholic country, so the Catholic children stayed in the classroom, and the Jewish children, I think there were about seven in our class, were taken out and we had Jewish education in a different classroom. It was perfectly alright, nobody minded, but after the Nazis came in, suddenly we were the enemy. And my best friend was Catholic, and after school I usually popped in there, but after the invasion of the Nazis, their mother saw me coming and she said, We will never want to see you here again, and she slammed the door in my face.

My brother was 12 years old. He came home, he was all beaten up and blood streaming from his nose, from his mouth, and when my parents questioned him, he said, My own friends beat me up, and the teachers were there watching it. So, this was the situation.

So, you can imagine that most people tried to leave the country. But that wasn’t so easy. You had to have an exit visa, you had to have an entry visa at the country who welcomed you, and by 1938, and then later ’39, it was practically impossible to get a visa anywhere in the world.

My father was lucky. He had businesses in – in the Netherlands, and I think the next – second day, he left on a business trip, and he said, As soon as I’m settled, I’ll ask for you to follow. By the time he was ready for us, to receive us, the Dutch had closed the borders, as well, for Jewish application.

President Roosevelt had a meeting in France in 1936 already, and invited all the countries, the representatives of the countries, and the meeting was how many Jews are they going to let in. And it was practically nothing. So – and Hitler knew that, and so he realized later on if he was going to kill the Jews, nobody was going to lift a hand to object, and that is really what happened.

So, we were desperate to get out. In the meantime, already many people had been arrested and deported even. To – it was called resettlement, meaning they were taken to Polish ghettos, and once the ghettos were full, they were just executed.

So – but at the time, we didn’t quite know this, but we desperately wanted to leave. And we heard that you could go illegally over the border to Belgium. You might know that is similar how the Mexicans tried to come into your country now. But once you were there, they let you stay. So, we did that.

And we lived in Brussels. Of course, we couldn’t take anything with us. We lived in a little boarding house. I had to go to a French school, and nobody took any notice. I was looked at, you know, as strange person. Refugees were something which was not well known at the time. You know, most people stayed in their own countries, so people didn’t really know what to do with me. Nobody helped me with the language, and I became very shy and – and sad already. And my father tried desperately to get a visa for us.

In the meantime, Hitler was not happy just with Austria. He went into Czechoslovakia, and, again, the Allied just didn’t move. But then he started to attack Poland, and France had a pact with Poland. If Poland was attacked, the French would have to go into war. And England had a pact with France, so England and France declared war on Hitler.

But there was war, but there was no fighting because there was no common border. So, nothing really happened at the time.

But my father was afraid, he still lived in the Netherlands and in – in Belgium, that they would close the border and we won’t be able to get together again. And he had been trying all the time to get a visa for us, and eventually, in February 1940, he succeeded to get a visiting visa for us to come to Amsterdam.

And it took a furnished apartment on sort of a triangle, where there was a big open space in the middle and when you live in an apartment, you have no yards where you can play, so all the children of this neighborhood came on this big open place to play.

And I was 11 by that time, and one day a little girl came to me and introduced herself and said her name was Anna Frank. And we became friends. Anna was not in the same school. We would have been in the same class. She was in the Montessori school. It’s sort of, have you heard of Montessori teaching? Yes. I think people get more attention, the classes are smaller, and Anna’s older sister didn’t go into Montessori school. So, obviously, Otto must have realized that Anne is a bit different, needed perhaps, more attention. And it was true. She was a very big chatterbox. She loved talking, loved drawing attention to herself, and her nickname was Mrs. Quack-Quack.

[laughter]

Because she never stopped talking in class. Very often she had to stay behind and write a hundred lines I’m not going to talk so much in class. But she still did.

[laughter]

And on our square, she always tried to be the center of attention. She tried to attract a lot of kids and was telling stories. And I was still quite shy, and she was – I was more a tomboy. I liked to play grounders with the boys, like it’s your baseball, and I was very good. I always chosen as one of the first to be in their group. But Anna was – never did anything like that. She was very interested in her hairstyle, in clothes. She always had pictures of film stars, and as well – boys, already at 11.

When she heard I had an older brother, eyes grow very big and asked when she could come and visit us.

[laughter]

So, you know, we – we knew each other for two years, and we settled down, but we were afraid after three months we might have to leave.

But there was no need to because in May 1940, so just about three months when we were there, one night we heard airplanes and – and guns and we put on the radio and the announcer said, Terrible news, the Germans are trying – trying to invade our country.

You know, at the First World War, the Dutch, it’s lying under sea level, and they just opened the dikes, and the Germans couldn’t get in and bypassed it. So, Holland was not in the war in the First World War. And that was assumed again, this idea: We are not an important country. Hitler won’t be interested in us.

But Hitler wanted to conquer really – conquer the whole of Europe, which he succeeded.

And so, there was a very short five-day war, and the Dutch Queen, with her family escaped first to England, later to Canada, which was very depressing for the Dutch people, and, as well, it was the first time a civilian city had been bombed in that war. In the Spanish War, Civil War, of course, many, many cities had been bombed. It was horrific. But in this war, it hadn’t happened yet. And that was Rotterdam with 3,000 casualties. And after five days sort of fighting, the Dutch gave up. And we still tried to escape to England by boat, but when we got to the harbor, it was too late. So, we realized we were trapped.

[Darryle Clott]

And you ended up going into hiding for two years. Pappy and Heinz were separated to a different place, you and Mutti. Could you just talk to us about what it was like being in hiding for two years?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, I just have to tell you a little bit why we had to go into hiding. You know the Germans wanted to really catch all the Jews in Eur-Europe, but they didn’t want to alienate that population. So, the first few months nothing really happened. But then very slowly, slowly they started to take measures against the Jewish population with confiscating our bicycles, for instance. We were not allowed on public transport. We were not allowed to have radios. We were not allowed to visit Christians in their homes. They were not – so they tried to keep us separate from the ordinary Dutch population. And all through this, of course, the Dutch and everywhere in the occupied country, they formed resistance movements. Those were people who hated to be occupied by the foreign country, by the Nazis, and they did all kinds of things. They shot particularly bad Nazis. They blew up trains. They printed ration books. And then later, they were going to help Jewish people who had been beaten, picked up and taken to the death camps, and they were offering to hide people like that.

So, this is what happened to us. In 1942, so after two years of occupation, about 10,000 young people, most of you would have been included if you would be Jewish, got a call up notice to be deported to Germany to work in German factories. And many people sent their children, the young people, and they never ever heard from them because they never went to Germany to work in factories, but they were sent to Mauthausen, which is a horrific Austrian death camp, and they were just thrown down from the cliffs there. But we didn’t know that at the time. But nevertheless, many, many parents decided they wouldn’t send their children, but we would go into hiding.

Our father called us together, and said, Heinz is not going, and the only ways of avoiding that is sort of going underground and I’ve done some research and there’s some wonderful Dutch people, non-Jews, who, we don’t know them yet, who offered that they would keep us. But nobody - He told us, We have to separate again. I will go with Mutti, and he will go with Heinz. And I didn’t want to be separated and I cried. I said No, I want to stay together, And my father said, First of all, we don’t find a hiding place for four people but, as well, if we go two in one place, there’s a bigger chance that at least two of us will survive. That was the first time when I realized, it’s not just, sort of, hiding, but it is really a danger to our lives. And that was, for a 13-year-old, really quite frightening.

So, we – we separated, and we went to our different hiding places. And the Germans wanted to, it’s really amazing, they wanted, really, to catch every Jew in all the occupied countries. Everywhere, the same thing had happened. And so, they knew they sent out 10,000 notices, but only about 5,000 young people appeared, so where are those other 5,000? We really want to get them as well.

So, in the night, it was always at night, they came with trucks in all the roads, knocked on doors, the ordinary Dutch people had to open the door, had to let them in, had to let them search their homes and looking for Jews. So, in every hiding place we had, the people from the Resistance again came to look over their apartment and decided where would be a place where, if they come in, we could hide.

So, in the one place where we were for a long time, there was the main – there were two floors in the apartment, and upstairs, was a tiny little room, and a little bathroom, and there was a long room with a washbasin and a bath and, at the end, was a toilet. And they made a false partition with a trap door in the middle and tiled it, and so, when they would come, the Nazis, we would quickly go in there. And they finished on a weekend, and in the night, they came already to search us – for us. And we were very lucky it was all ready and cleaned up, so they didn’t find us.

But if this happens many times, you can imagine, people became scared, and so we had to change very often hiding places. I think we were in about seven different places. Some just several weeks, some several months, and one or two, even – even longer than that.

[Darryle Clott]

It was just you and Mutti. What on Earth did you do all day? Did – did she teach you? You must have been bored.

[Eva Schloss]

As I told you – as I told you, I didn’t like reading or writing. I was pretty bad at school, and especially going [to] school first in Austria, then in French, then in Dutch. It was really very difficult. And I didn’t read in what language, I wasn’t good in any languages, and my mother tried to do homework with me, but you don’t take it very easily from your mother.

[Darryle laughs]

I know you have in America home schooling, but just one to one, it just didn’t work. I was a very bad pupil. My mother lost her patience and I started to cry. And she – it was – it was – it didn’t really work. So, we gave that up.

And so, what did I do? Sat there fiddling my thumbs, complaining, looking miserable. We were not even allowed to move because neighbors might hear you move, and then, they might think there are burglars, and they would call the police. So, we just had to sit still the whole day, which, for a person who was very active, was really terrible. And the nights, we were always afraid. So, I thought this is already the worst that can happen. But when we started to go into hiding, our parents said, Well, a couple of months. The war – especially when America came in in ’41, everybody thought it will be a matter of a few months. But America didn’t really fight in Europe. They had to fight the war in Asia. So, you know, the war lasted six years.

So – after [sighs]

[Darryle Clott]

So, you were in hiding for two years, and on your 15th birthday, May 11th, you were betrayed and sent to Auschwitz. Can you talk about that experience?

[Eva Schloss]

We had just moved again to a different hiding place. My father had phoned my mother a few weeks before. The woman where they were staying is blackmailing them for more money. You had to pay something, but, you know, not outrageous. Like for the food and for the laundry and things like that. But this woman wanted to make money out of it. And after two years in hiding, our resources had more or less dried up. We just had still a bit of jewelry left which my father sold to the Resistance. And so, it was, in – in ’44, it was already very difficult to find safe places. The Dutch non-Jewish people, young men, were picked up as well, in the street, to go to work in Germany. That was called forced labor. And many, of course, most of them, didn’t want to go, as you can imagine. So, they went already into hiding.

Many people had been arrested and taken to camps, non-Jews. And so, it took my mother perhaps three weeks til a Dutch nurse came forward and said she knows a safe place. But it turned out she was really a double agent; she really worked for the Nazis.

Just to tell you an example what kind of people those were. Her boyfriend was really a member of the Resistance and he came to her, all the time, and said, I need a hiding place for family, I need a hiding place for a child, and she always had a hiding place. And sometimes he wanted to get in touch with those people who she was taking to the hiding places, and she said, No, no, you can’t, you can’t, it’s impossible. And so, he started to become suspicious of her, and she realized that. So, she renounced him, her own boyfriend, and he was shot on the spot.

So – and in the house where she put all those people, who she said was safe, more than 200 Jewish people were betrayed. We heard that only, of course, after the war. And this place was just, my father and brother, their last place had been out in the country, and so this place happened to be very near where we just had moved to. And on a Sunday afternoon, we went to visit them. And they followed us so that they know who – where we were. And on Tuesday morning, on my birthday, we were going to have a special birthday dinner because there was really very little food, we heard a knock on the door and the Nazis stormed in and arrested us. And there was no way out. My mother still tried to say that we are not Jewish, but they knew who we were, so we were taken away.

And within three days, we were already put on transport to the east. Holland is the most western country, and the east meant death camps because the B.B.C., the British Broadcast Corporation, sent broadcasts out to all the occupied countries in their own language. And I know in Dutch, so you were not supposed to listen to foreign broadcasts, most people did because they had to know what really happens in the war. The Germans only told the victories. They never had any defeats, which, of course, for forty – ’44 was not at all the case. But the British, of course, told and we always listened to it very softly. And I remember very clearly. They told the progress of the war, but they told, as well, about the 300 concentration camps and death camps in Germany, Austria, and Poland. And Auschwitz was always mentioned as the biggest, the worst, where there were gas chambers that Jewish people were systematically gassed.

So, they never told us where we were going. We were traveling in cattle cars. Sort of good trains, metal. There was just a little slit of air and two buckets. One was water, the other one – the other one using for toilets. So, you can imagine: 400 people, one bucket. Once a day, the doors were slid – slid open and they threw bread out of a bucket. They threw bread – chunks of bread, like you would feed – feed wild animals. So, already a terrible degradation.

While we were in the cattle car, the last conversation I had ever with my brother, he told me – as I told you, he was a musician – but in hiding, of course, he had to be very quiet. So, he wanted to do something else, occupy himself, and he started to paint. And he created some amazing oil paintings, and he told me before they escaped from this woman who blackmailed them, he hid the painting under the floorboard in that house with a note on it: This belongs to Heinz and Erich Geiringer. And after the war, he’s going to come and pick it up again. And he told me, You’ll be amazed what I’ve achieved.

And after a horrible journey, the train stopped, and the doors were rolled open. And it was a beautiful May day and we looked around and we saw we were on a platform, and it said Auschwitz, Oswiecim in Polish. And it was a smallish Polish little town where the Germans had used the land around it as a huge, huge, about 10 square miles of death camps. There were many camps. Auschwitz was the name of the town, so that’s why it is known. But there was Birkenau, which was a women’s camp, which was actually much bigger and much more horrible. And then there was Monowitz, which was a work camp. The gas was produced, as well, there, by inmates even. And there were some work camps as well. And after people had become too ill and too weak to work in the weak camps, they were gassed in Auschwitz.

And so, the first command was men and women to different sides. So, you can imagine how well that was. Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, kissing, screaming, thinking perhaps that it’s the last time they will ever see each other on Earth. And then the men walked away. Then appeared a very, very nice, clean officer. Polished boots, white gloves, and youngish man, and everybody, the other inmates who were there, we – we heard them whisper, Dr. Death, Dr. Death, Mengele He was the camp doctor, doctor, a real doctor, medical doctor, but he decided who was going to live and who was going to die.

So, the first selection was taken place. We had to stand in rows of five, he looked you over, and he – like a conductor that conducted you this direction or this direction.

About half our transport, any children, babies, older looking people, they didn’t ask their age, it just depended how you looked, went to one side. My mother and me, luckily, went to the right side. Then we were marched into the camp, into a huge, huge barrack. The first command: undress completely naked. And the S.S. were walking around laughing at our embarrassment, as you can image.

One shock after the other happened. Our head was shaved, then we were tattooed. We were told you’re not a human being, you are like cattle, who gets a number. If ever we want you, you will only be called out by the number. It was all degradation.

And while this was happening, it took many, many hours, they told us that the family you’ve be separated from were told to have a shower, and they went in there expecting water to come – there were pipes and shower heads. Nothing happened. No water. Not a drop of water. And they waited and waited, and they started to have breathing difficulties, started to feel faint, and within 10, 12, 15 minutes, everybody had fallen to the floor and were dead. And the Germans looked through little holes on the roof, and when everybody – nobody moved anymore, other inmates had to come and take out the dead bodies. And that was called the Sonderkommando, special work unit. And those people who did their job knew that within three weeks it was their turn. That was the system at work. So, can you imagine how those people felt taking out bodies knowing in three weeks, they would be a body like that.

So, and they told us laughing with pleasure at people who had just lost a child, started to cry and to scream, they just, Ha-ha-ha-ha, ha, well, you will be burning soon, too. The cruelty, you know, the pleasure of hurting us was just unbelievable. You know, they say always later they had to do their duty, but that wasn’t duty. That was sadism. They really tried to make life more and more unnecessarily difficult for us.

So, eventually we were taken out, still naked, and they were huge – confiscating everything, every transport, everything you wore, everything was taken away from you. And – and so, we had to parade naked in front of huge heaps of clothes and we sold one garment, whatever was on this heap. It could have been a winter coat, it could have been a night dress, whatever. And then the next heap were shoes. Again, we were sold two shoes, which of course was never a pair, never anything that fitted. And that was all our possessions we ever had. We had not even a piece of toilet paper. Not any underwear or anything like that.

[Darryle Clott]

You were at Auschwitz for eight months. Could you talk about daily living conditions, including food, your -your work camp experiences, that type of thing.

[Eva Schloss]

After we came, after we had our possessions, we were taken to a barrack which was low buildings which on both sides there were, sort of, you might have seen pictures of them, sort of three high like cages. Wooden structures with nothing in it. And 10 people had to crawl into one of those cages. And that was where we slept. As I said, there was nothing in it. The only thing that was in this woodwork was bedbugs and lice. So, within days we were covered in lice, not just head lice, but body lice. And the itching and the filth was just unbelievable.

In the morning, early, we were called out. There were about 500 people in every barrack. And there was a roll call. We were to stand in rows of five this way in front of the barrack, and the whole camp was counted, which took usually two hours. If the number didn’t – it wasn’t correct, what they thought, because it happened very often that in the night somebody in a barrack had died and wasn’t reported. So, then the whole camp had to be recounted, which took another two hours. And we had to stand not moving at all. If you kind of – if they saw you moving or crouching down because it’s very tiring to stand, especially later, when we were so exhausted, you were really beaten very, very hard. And when eventually that was finished, we got our breakfast, which was a mug with some kind of liquid. And then we were picked for work commanders, which varied from day to day. Sometimes we had to carry huge boulders. Sometimes, was one of the worst jobs, we had to empty, with a little mug, the latrines because they were just big holes which didn’t go anywhere, and we had to empty that and take it somewhere else.

Can you imagine? Without washing afterward. Washing was practically non-existing. So, you can imagine how smelly and stinky and disgusting and full of germs we were. That not everybody got typhus and dysentery and cholera immediately is a miracle. But many, many people got those illnesses, of course, which could be cured with treatment and medication, but there wasn’t. So, many people perished in this way. Many people starved to death because you can’t exist very long on this little food.

[Darryle Clott]

What about your work in Canada and the things you found as you were carrying that out?

[Eva Schloss]

When we arrived in Auschwitz in May, the Hungarian Jews, who had been free til then because Hungary was not occupied but was an ally of Germany was occupied then by the Germans in 1944, and all the Hungarian Jews were picked up. And every day, transport of thousands of those people arrived. And there was one place in Birkenau where all those belongings which those people brought had to be sorted because, you know, Germany was bombed by the Allies and many, many people lost all their belongings. And everything the Jews were bringing into the camps was sorted and shipped to Germany. Clothes, suitcases, glasses, shoes, whatever you carry in suitcase, whatever you can imagine was taken to the German population.

But we had to, and I was picked to work there for three weeks while the Hungarian transport arrived. And we had to, one of my jobs was to open all the hems of dresses and coats and jackets because many, many people, when they were arrested or known and were put on transport, hid their jewelry, money, any valuables there, thinking perhaps they can bribe their way out to freedom. And we found really watches, we found diamond rings, we found gold coins, cigarettes, as well a lot of food. So, this was three weeks I worked there, and that was not so bad. You know, that certainly helped me to survive.

[Darryle Clott]

I – I’ve heard this, and to me the – the – the saddest thing is she would tell about finding, not – not treasures, but what they turned out to be treasures to people, the little photos of their families –

[Eva Schloss]

Some people –

[Darryle Clott]

– that were sewn.

[Eva Schloss]

Some people, the only things they did bring along was family. And very often I saw family of a lovely smiling baby know – knowing that this child had already been gassed.

[Darryle Clott]

[sighs with despair] We can’t even imagine, can we? You were at the doorstep of death at Auschwitz, and yet, you had miracle after miracle. Could you just talk a little bit about some of those, please.

[Eva Schloss]

Time went on. You know, every day was the same. We didn’t know what day of the week it was. There was no Sunday. We didn’t even know the months. We only knew, really, the season. When it started to be cold, it became autumn and then winter. And in autumn, so it could have been October I suppose, I don’t know, we had a – we went to a shower, occasionally went to a shower. It – it was called – you were deloused because we were so full of lice, and they didn’t really want us to be so – because it jumped of course as well on the – on the guards. They didn’t want to be plagued by that. So, from time to time we were deloused. And we came out of the shower, and Mengele, this doctor with his S.S. guard stood there and the selection was taking place. It happened from time to time. And I passed, had to turn around in front of Mengele, then my mother followed behind me, and he looked at her and like – and she was quite tall and she had become I must say really very, very thin already because very often she had given me part of her bread ration. And he looked at her and decided she was not fit anymore for work, and he put her, with about 40 other women from our group, aside. And those women marched naked out into a barrack where they were waiting to be taken to the gas chambers. So, I thought I’d lost my mother, and through a miracle, she was saved. And after about three months we were reunited.

But, you know, this was really amazing. It’s a long story. I can’t really explain it to you so quickly. But in Eva’s Story, my first book which I wrote in ’88, my mother was still alive, and she describes exactly what has happened. She was 40 years old at the time, and she had accepted that that would be the end of her life. She only prayed that her children would survive. And, she was saved through a miracle, and we were reunited again, and after that, she had then – she had another 53 years of life. So, you know, it – it could have been finished for her. And very happily – happy years. Married 27 years of it with Otto Frank. And it was a very, very happy marriage. So – but her life could have been cut short.

[Darryle Clott]

In January – well, on January 27th , 1945, the Russians liberated Auschwitz. How did you end up finding Otto Frank?

[Eva Schloss]

You know, one day the – the German(s) took – took everyday people out of the camp. They knew – we didn’t know – that the Russians are fighting their way in – into Poland and are soon going to come to Auschwitz. And they didn’t want Jewish people to be freed. And, as well, they themselves, the – the guards, were very afraid of the Russians, so they – many escaped and it became not so strict anymore. You could move around more. There was no work and no guards really. And the camp had become quite small.

And one morning, we woke up, and it was very, very quiet. We got outside and all the Nazis, most of the inmates had disappeared in the night. And we were for about ten days on our own, and many people died at that time, and we couldn’t bury them because we had no tools and there was – there was ice. So, I was one of the few people who could still carry the bodies, so we had to heap them up outside the barracks. That was a – a job and a sight which I will never get out of my head. Terrible. Really terrible.

And one day, we walked around again, you know, not knowing we could have gone. The gate was open. But we were weak, it was cold, we didn’t know what were the Polish people – were they helping us, were they killing us, because it was, you know, the Poles knew there was this camp. Never had anyone thrown a piece of bread over the fence or helped anybody. So, we just stayed put.

And at the gate one day, I saw a huge creature all covered in fur and with ice – with icicles hanging on him cause it was unbelievable cold. And from the distance, I thought at first it was a bear. But when I looked closer, I realized it was a – a – a huge man. It was a scout from the Russians to and to find out what was going on before the Army followed.

And after another few days, the Army came and – with horses, with field kitchens, with guns, with cannons, all kind of things. And they made to stay the night, they put the field kitchen up and they fed us what they ate as well. Wonderful, the smell when they cooked it drove us already mad. You know, we hadn’t had any proper food for months and months, and it was cabbage soup. Very, very greasy with bits of fat in it, and it was just delicious. And they gave us big bowls with it, and we ate and ate and ate. But I’ve never spent a more painful night on a bucket –

[laughter]

– because the food went straight through me.

[laughter]

And I realized I have to be very, very careful. And in the morning, many people had died from overeating. Their bodies just didn’t have the strength to digest the food. So, we had to be very, very careful.

And then I decided – and they left again. I decided I would go to the men camp, Auschwitz, to see if I could find my father and brother. And I went there and there was about 300, 400, 500 men left behind. The others had all been taken out. And I saw two people who I’d known in Amsterdam, and I went to one and he looked familiar, but I didn’t really know, and it turned out to be Otto Frank, Anna’s father. We didn’t know that the family had been in hiding. We didn’t know they’d been betrayed. We didn’t know they’d been taken to Auschwitz.

And the first question Otto, of course, asked me if I’d seen his family, his girls, or his wife, and I hadn’t seen them. And I asked him if he’d seen my father and my brother, and he said Yes, they were here, but a few days ago, they left with the Germans. So, that was actually good news because I thought, Well, the war will be finished perhaps in a few weeks, and they would be alive and we would be reunited again.

[Darryle Clott]

It took you and your mother five months to get back to Amsterdam. Could you talk about that experience? And also, Otto Frank was –

[Eva Schloss]

As well –

[Darryle Clott]

– as well.

[Eva Schloss]

All – all – all the women who were liberated, not the Polish people because they were able to get back to their country, if they were in their country. All the people from the west were looked after by the Russians. We were put in trains, and they moved us eastward because we couldn’t get back home yet.

So, we traveled four months with the Russians, every day traveling, and we saw unbelievable devastation. The Germans had burned down every town, every village, every field. It was just – just nothing left. And people came crawling out of the rubble and came to see us transport because they had lost people and they thought perhaps family will come. They all had photos showing us. There were a lot of Jewish soldiers as well who we met who was traveling towards the fallen. They, too, wanted to know some of the family had been picked up and wanted to know if we had perhaps seen anybody.

But the interesting thing was that always photos of their family in their pockets and always of Stalin, and they always kissed the photos and said, Stalin, Stalin. He was greatly, greatly loved and admired, which sometimes it surprises us because what we knew in the West was, he was a terrible tyrant. But he was a very, very good General. And the – the way the Russians fought, you might have heard the Siege of St. Petersburg and the battle around Stalingrad. There’s a wonderful movie about it. If you can, try to see it. The Russians really, you know, they – they adore their country, Mother Russia, and millions, 3 – 300 – 30 million of Russians died in defense of their country because the war was really fought, most of the war, on the Russian soil. And so, you know, I have no complaints about them. There was no rape. There was no bad treatment. They fed us and – and – and clothed us. We got Russian uniforms. I’ve still got it. It doesn’t fit me, of course, anymore.

[laughter]

Much too small. But it’s still nice to have it. And eventually, we ended up in Odessa, and there we waited for the end of the war, and when that came, of course, there was great jubilation that we had survived.

And then we were keen to get back, of course, to the west and find out what has happened to our family.

[Darryle Clott]

So, you got back to Amsterdam, and what was very unusual – what I find very unusual is that your apartment was still there, because that was – thats not the norm –

[Eva Schloss]

No, no.

[Darryle Clott]

– but yours was there.

[Eva Schloss]

Well, I told you we came to Amsterdam with nothing, and it was a furnished apartment belonging to a non-Jewish person who had rented it out to us. And it was still all there, and so when we returned, she let us back in. But all the other people who came back, other people had moved in, and so, Otto Frank had really nowhere to go. And he went to stay with Miep Geis who was one of the helpers when the people were hiding, but she was, as well, the person who found the diary.

[Darryle Clott]

And so, Otto Frank, having nowhere to go, started coming to visit you and your mother, and youre – they became reacquainted, and one day he showed up with a parcel, and it was –

[Eva Schloss]

Miep Geis found the diary but wasn’t going to give it to Otto when he came back because she was going to hand it over to Anna. But only after Otto told her after several weeks when he heard that Anna and Margot had both perished in another camp in Bergen-Belsen, did she give him the valuable little book. And Otto was very proud of it, and he came to our house and opened it, as if it was gold and showed us. And as well he said, Can I read you something? And he started to read, but he ne-never got further than a couple of lines. He always burst into tears. It took him three weeks to read it, and then, he translated it into German to send it to his mother.

And he was immensely proud of it. He knew, of course, that she had written a book in her diary, but he had no idea what she had written. And he was amazed. He always used to say, you know, I didn’t even know my own child.

[Darryle Clott]

When did you find out that Pappy and Heinz had not – had not survived, that they had perished?

[Eva Schloss]

After several weeks when we were back at Amsterdam, we got a notification from the Red Cross. ‘Til this day, I don’t know how they knew because I can’t imagine that the Germans, in the last day of the War, the last day of fighting, that they still kept records. But it – it was there, the record, and it was written very clearly. There was the name and the birth of date. My father, my brother had both died in this terrible camp, Mauthausen, several days before the American army came to liberate that camp.

Well, that was for us the last straw. We had survived hoping we would get to our normal family life again, but when that was shattered, I became very, very miserable and depressed, and hated everybody.

[Darryle Clott]

And then Otto encouraged you to go to London, and he gave you his Leica –

[Eva Schloss]

Leica.

[Darryle Clott]

– camera and – and encouraged you to go and set you up with an appointment with – with a photographer, correct?

[Eva Schloss]

Yeah. I had to go first to school. I was only 16, but I had a miserable time in school. I was much older than my classmates because I had lost a few years. And when I finished school, I didn’t know what to do with myself, and Otto and my mother decided I should become a photographer because I was quite artistic. And Otto gave me his camera. He said he took many, many pic – pictures of his family. There is as well an exhibition about all the photos, which I showed. Very lovely. And he said, I have no family anymore, I don’t want to make any photos, so here’s his camera. And he found me a job in London as an apprentice for a year.

And so, in 1951, I went to London, and I lived in a little boarding house where a young man from Israel had come to study economics. And we became very friendly, and we went for long walks because we both didn’t have any money. We didn’t go to see it at cinema, and just talked about what we were doing, about our jobs and things. Never who we really were. I just told him I was Dutch, and he told me he was Israeli, which was both not true. And – and after six months, he said to me, Eva, I’ve fallen in love with you. Will you marry me? And we can start a new life and go to Israel. Because he intended to go back when he was finished with his studies. And I said to him, No, thank you,

[laughter]

because I have a widowed mother in Amsterdam and once I’m finished with this year, I was here just for a year, I’m going to go back to her. I couldn’t imagine I would desert her.

And then Otto, who kept an eye on me a little bit, came over one day and I told him that. And he said, when I told him, This young man asked me to marry him and I would actually marry him, but, of course, I’m not. So, he said, Well, your mother and me have fallen in love as well, and once you get settled, we’d like to get married. So I went back to this young man, and said, Well, you can marry me now.

[laughter]

And he was very happy. But when my mother came to meet him, she asked him not to take me so far away to Israel. And that was difficult for him because he had all his family there, he didn’t know where he wanted to be, if he should succeed in another country, but eventually he realized, If he really wants to marry me, we have to stay in England. And that is where we still live now. And we married in 1952, and Otto and my mother a year later in 1953. And we have been married now for 63 years, and though we didn’t know each other really, it seemed to have been a good choice because of this long marriage.

[laughter]

[Darryle Clott]

Otto’s goal in life was to first publish Anne’s diary and then publicize it, and your mother took that on also. And that must have been difficult for you. Didn’t you sometimes feel like you were living in the shadow of Anne Frank?

[Eva Schloss]

Yes, I certainly did because, first of all, the diary was the very first book of anything being written and published about this terrible time. Of course, it is not a Holocaust story like many, many other books, like Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi or many survivors who wrote books later, but that came actually much, much later. But that was the first book when it published in America in 1952, it became an immediate bestseller. And so, Anna became very well-known all around the world. It was translated into 70 languages, and whenever I was introduced by Otto or by even my mother or by anybody, it was always, This is Anna Frank’s stepsister. And I was quite upset because I said, Well, I’m a person in my own right, and I did – I – I thought I was even, you know, stronger than Anna. I survived. And so, it upset me, and I was quite jealous. Why was always Anna mentioned and not me? And even when I wrote my first book, it was still Anna Frank’s stepsister’s book.

And – but, you know, I started to think, when I started to be more myself again, How can I be jealous of somebody who was murdered when they were not even quite 15 years old? This poor girl didn’t really have a life, so let her be famous. I have a – a husband; I’ve got three daughters. Later, I’ve got five grandchildren, so, you know, I accept that I’m just Anna Frank’s stepsister.

[laughter]

[Darryle Clott]

Would you share with us what you thought of the diary when you first read it?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, when Otto gave it to me to read because he wanted everybody to read it, I said, Well, so what? You know, I wasn’t impressed. I said, Well, I was in hiding and – and I was arrested. It’s very similar for what happened to me. And as I told – told you I wasn’t very literate at the time. But much, much later when it started and became so famous and I started to reread it, I realized why it became so famous, because for a little girl of 13, she had an amazing talent in writing and in observing and describing what she saw. And as well, she had, for a 13-, 14-year-old, an amazing idea of what she wants the world to look. She – she writes about religion. She writes about feminism, about morals, and that was really quite amazing.

But after Otto became my stepfather, and he started to be sort of the educator of our – our children, I realized that Anna had a lot of Otto. He was a wonderful human being, humanitarian, and Otto – Anna and Otto, her father, were very, very close. And, obviously, in the two years being cooped up together, they must have talked a lot about all these kind of subjects that which was interesting to Otto and which became interesting to Anna. So, I really could see Otto’s spirit in Annas writing.

[Darryle Clott]

Eva, you kept silent about your own story for 41 years, not starting to share until 1986, why?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, you know, I didn’t want to burden our children with the suffering we had gone through. And on the same level, the children didn’t want to question me. What had happened was very painful if you know how your parents or your mother or grandmother had suffered. So, we didn’t talk about it. Didn’t talk. And that is not just in my family, that is everywhere. And very often when I speak, a second-generation person comes up to me and says, Oh, I wish my mother or my father would have told me what had happened to them, but now they are dead so I will never know how they were able to survive. And that was, of course, it’s a shame that we didn’t speak earlier. It was as well a shame that Holocaust education wasn’t taken up earlier. Til the ’60s and even sometimes in the ’70s and in the ’80s, it wasn’t taught in school. People had no idea what had really happened in the war, and certainly not about the Holocaust.

And so, I think we missed educating a couple of generations about the evil of discrimination and racism.

So, in – in Amsterdam where the Anna Frank house, where the people were hiding, many, many tourists came knocking on the door wanting to see the hiding place. And Otto already was there, always showed people around. And so, they decided it would become a museum. But not everybody could come to Amsterdam. So, the people there, they had historians, made a traveling exhibition with not just the history, but, about as well, the rise of the German Reich and the battles and camps and everything. Very, very wonderful exhibition. And they decided they would travel around the world with it, but the very first one was in English, it came to London in 1986. And, of course, my mother and me were invited, and Otto had died. He was 17 years older than my mother. He died in 1980, but he was 91 years old. And so, it was a very moving event. There were about 200 people and there was a head table and a podium, and everybody spoke about how important it is. And the organizer said to me, Come and sit with us at the head table, which I did, never expecting anything, just sits there. And then in the end he said, And now Eva will want to say a few words to you. I can tell you; I didn’t want to say anything.

[laughter]

I wanted to hide under the table. But I couldn’t do that, of course. So, I got up, and everybody looked expectantly. What is she going to talk about? And I just stared, and then, I can – I can remember I felt so terrible. What am I going to say? I have no clue. I’d never spoken about anything, not just about the Holocaust. And there was all those people wanting me to tell them something. But eventually, I broke down and everything I had suppressed for 40 years came flooding out, and they had difficulties stopping me. And it was really, for me, an amazing, wonderful experience. I realized people were interested, people were desperate to know more, and it was a watershed. This exhibition traveled all over England. I always asked to open it, which I couldn’t really do. I wasn’t a speaker. My husband wrote a speech for me. I always had to take a tranquilizer.

[laughter]

And so, slowly, I started to find my own voice. And I must say, I haven’t stopped speaking since.

[laughter]

[Darryle Clott]

You went back to Auschwitz in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the liberation thinking you were going to find, perhaps, closure?

[Eva Schloss]

Yes.

[Darryle Clott]

What happened?

[Eva Schloss]

That’s what I thought. In ’95 it was the 50th anniversary of the liberation, and the Russians were not occupying Poland anymore and the western countries made a big memorial service there. And the Dutch television asked me to make a program with them there. And I was very reluctant to go, but in the end, I said, Well, I was 15 only, it was 50 years later, perhaps I remembered it different. And I did go, but it was horrendous. So, I decided I would never, ever go. But the one nice thing was that some of the Russian soldiers who had liberated the camp were there, and I could say a proper thank you to them.

[Darryle Clott]

And you were just there again.

[Eva Schloss]

And still, in March of this year, the German television asked me to do a program with them and they are going to make a big documentary about the end of the Second World War. And I have done several programs with the German television, and I think for Germany they should really learn more and know about it, so I decided I would go again. And it was quite different. It was, of course, very emotional, but by now they have sorted out all the documents which were found, and I was able to see the entries of my father and brother. I’ve learned their tattoo number. I’ve seen the barracks where they were housed. So, it was actually very emotional, but I learned a lot actually because once you’re in the camp, you don’t really know what was happening outside and so on. And I’ve seen a lot more than when I was an inmate, and as well a lot more than when I went with the Dutch because we spent really a full day there from nine o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in the evening. We really filmed everywhere, and they just couldn’t get enough of it, those German television crews.

When I had – it was very, very cold. I was tired. I was hungry. I was cold. But they said, Now, okay, let’s do this still, and Let’s do this still. And they were so wonderful. They were so understanding, and they cried. And so, that we really did – I think it will be a very, very good documentary, and it is important.

[Darryle Clott]

I learned about you by co-directing the play that is about you, And Then They Came For Me: Remembering the Diary of Anne Frank. This play is about you and Anne, and a young Jewish man, Ed Silberberg, living in the same neighborhood in Amsterdam, and that play has been produced all over the world, and you’ve been at over 500 of the performances doing Q&As. I just wonder how that play has impacted you, affected you?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, when – when I was confronted with the playwright, I was very, very willing to do that because you know Anna Frank says in her diary when she dies, she would like to live on. And, well, she has succeeded with this. And that’s the most that you can. The body, of course, goes, but the world knows about you. You are remembered. And that is really what everybody would like to be. And my brother, I talked to you a little bit about him, he was a very, very gentle boy, very talented, and when he was 12, he saw already what was happening around him. Many, many of his friends were taken away, and kids were killed. And he became very much afraid of dying. And when he was 12, he said to me one night, What will happen when we die? Will we just disappear? I’m frightened. And I said, Well, let’s ask our father, he has answers to everything.

And we went in the morning, and Heinz said, Pappy, what will happen when I die? Will I just disappear? I’m frightened. And my father said, Well, of course, your body will deteriorate. Whatever – well, if you have children, you will live on in your children. And then this 12-year-old boy said, But what if I die before I have any children? And my father said, Well, whatever you have done, whatever you have achieved, whatever you said, somebody will remember, and we’re all a link in a chain which goes from generation to generation, nothing gets ever lost. And he had to accept this. And, of course, he died, and very often my mother and me said, Well, nobody knows about Heinz. So, I decided I would write another book, my second book, The Promise. So, keeping the promise to Heinz and my father that Heinz won’t be forgotten. And it tells about his life, as well, many wonderful things, and as well, of course, about Auschwitz, and as well about his artwork. And as well, besides doing all those paintings, he wrote over 200 poems. Some are really very, very sad. But all quite with a deep meaning for a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old boy. It was amazing what he – what ideas he had about life and everything. And in this book, I have translated a couple of his poems.

[Darryle Clott]

I want you to share one, but I’m pretty sure everybody wants to know what happened to those paintings. He told on the train to Auschwitz that they were under the –

[Eva Schloss]

Floorboard.

[Darryle Clott]

– floorboards in the – in a hiding place.

[Eva Schloss]

In – in – in the last hiding place where they were.

[Darryle Clott]

What happened?

[Eva Schloss]

And after – I must admit, after all the things that just happened to us, I had forgotten about the paintings. But after Otto came with the diary and it helped him so much, I said to my mother, We have to go and get Heinz’s paintings. We didn’t really want to go there to meet with this terrible woman who had blackmailed them, but when we got there, luckily, the woman wasn’t living there anymore. And there lived a young couple who didn’t want to believe us first that there are paintings under the floorboards, didn’t want to let us in, but eventually they did. And, indeed, we found 30 amazing artwork which Heinz had created, and as well the 200 poems.

[Darryle Clott]

And where are the paintings now?

[Eva Schloss]

And a few years ago, I donated them to the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, and they made a beautiful exhibition of it all. And, of course, like all museums, you know, they have so much material, they can’t display everything the whole time. It is sometimes on display, and some of the paintings are always there. And I think I will finish now with reading one of his poems which is one of the sad ones. Ooops.

“Don’t cry, Mama. Mama, do I have to die already? I heard the doctor say so. Please, Mama, don’t cry. Heaven is such a beautiful place. And soon we’ll be together again. Mama, what will my little sister say when she wants to play with me again? Please, Mama, don’t cry. After all, I’ll be seeing Dad again. He’s been waiting up there so long already. Remember to take good care of the kitten. She loves me so. Please, Mama, don’t cry. Do you still love me as much as ever? Are you still with me? Please tell me, Mama. Please hold my hand for just a minute. It seems so misty in the room. Please, Mama, don’t cry. Mama, just one more thing, Please kiss me goodbye.”

[Darryle Clott]

Eva, despite growing up in a less than wonderful world, you have had a very successful life. You had two prosperous businesses in photography and antiques. You and Zvi have a 63-year-old marriage. You have three health – happy, healthy daughters and five grandchildren, and what – you – you come, and you share your story of overcoming obstacles, and, surely, every one of us sitting in this room or listening, have – we have to understand that we can persevere in our own lives and certainly overcome obstacles that we have. And we just thank you so much for coming and sharing your story with us.

Thank you.

[standing ovation]

[Eva Schloss]

Thank you. Thank you.

[standing ovation]

Amazing all this – amazing.

[standing ovation]

[Eva Schloss]

We’ll have some questions now. Well have some questions.

[Darryle Clott]

Thank you. Were gonna have some questions and answers now. And there’s a microphone right there.

[Elderly female audience member]

It was intriguing when you said you weren’t Dutch, but your husband wasn’t Israeli. What was he really?

[Eva Schloss]

German, but a German Jew. They were able to get out of the country in 1936 and go into Palestine.

[Elderly female audience member]

Ah. Okay. Wonderful. Thank you.

[Eva Schloss]

And we were stateless. You know, first we were Austrians, then we had to become German, and then they took all our nationality away, and we were stateless. We – we never got to Dutch nationality.

[Middle-aged female audience member]

Did you ever get to Palestine?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, to Israel later, but I never lived there, no.

[Darryle Clott]

Any other questions?

[Young female audience member]

Hi. This is a very personal question, but I’ve always wondered, what it does to your faith to have to survive something like you did?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, it’s a very important question, and we all – I think we all struggle with belief. And I must admit I came out of the camp an atheist, and not only didn’t I believe in any God, but as well in – not in humanity. Didn’t believe in any beings, in any goodness in people because I had to experience such terrible, terrible things. And in the camp, the only thing that we could do was pray, and we prayed to God to stop those atrocities. And God wasn’t there. So, you know, I thought, Well, if – if there is a God and he sees the suffering of his people, he would have stopped it. So, I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t. And to live without any belief is very tough, and I became more and more bitter and full of hatred, and I was really very unhappy who I was.

So, I think I was searching, and I think the first miracle which happened was the birth of my first daughter because I was damaged mentally and physically, but I was still able to give birth to a child. I think that made me reconsider. But I must say, you know, I’m not fully – not a full believer. I’m still searching. Sometimes I believe; sometimes I don’t. And I question and I have many debates with pastors and with priests and with rabbis looking for an answer, and the answer is always: You mustn’t question, you must believe. So, well, this is a mystery of – of life. We will never have an answer. We will never know, but I think life is easier if you have a belief. Thank you.

[Darryle Clott]

And I think over here.

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

Hi. Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. When you told your children and you talked to them about what had happened to you, how did they react? What were their feelings? Did they not question before why you had a tattoo on your arm?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, my grandson once questioned me. He said, Oma, what is this number? But, you know, he was small, I didn’t want to tell him. I said, Oh, I can’t remember my telephone number.

[laughter]

And, you know, our girls, of course, and Otto was their grandfather, they knew there wasn’t – it wasnt an ordinary family. They knew there was this Anna who they didn’t really understand what it was all about, but, you know we just – it was just too painful to talk about it and for them too painful to ask us. So, they didn’t. And – and, as I said, it’s not just in my family; it’s in all Holocaust survivor families. There is this silence about this terrible period.

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

So you never talked to them about it?

[Eva Schloss]

Only when I wrote my book. In 1988 it came out, I gave it to them, it’s dedicated to them, and I hoped through reading it, they will know and then, perhaps we will talk about it. My oldest daughter took the book but said she’s never going to read it. She didn’t want me to know that I know, and when I came to her home it was lying open on the bedside table. So, she did read it, but she didn’t want me to know. And she still, ’til now, doesn’t want to talk about it.

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

I’ve heard that in other people, too. Were your grandchildren interested?

[Eva Schloss]

Yeah. With the grandchildren, we have a complete different open. . . um. . . ah. . . situation. They ask me, our – one of our girls when – when she was 18, in this play you’ve heard, she played even me in it. And my youngest daughter, shes much – she – it’s much easier to talk about it with this, she played my mother. You can imagine that was a very emotional play for both of them.

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

Thank you.

[Darryle Clott]

Yes.

[Very young female audience member, softly]

Would you be willing to show us your tattoo?

[Darryle Clott]

Can you speak in there a little bit?

[Very young female audience member]

Would you be willing to show us your tattoo?

[Darryle Clott]

She wants to know if you would show your tattoo?

[Eva Schloss]

Yes, I’ll show you later.

[Darryle Clott]

It’s very light, so I don’t think it would show up from here.

[Eva Schloss]

No, you wouldn’t see it from a distance.

[Darryle Clott]

Later.

[Eva Schloss]

Yes.

[Young college-aged male audience member]

What was your motivation to start telling your story?

[Darryle Clott]

What was your motivation to start telling these stories? I think you sort of addressed that.

[Eva Schloss]

Well, I was kind of put on the spot to talk, you know? I would never have talked if I wouldn’t have been asked to talk about it.

[Darryle Clott]

But after that, you’ve been touring the world.

[Eva Schloss]

Since – since ’88, I’ve been nonstop speaking actually. Everywhere, everywhere.

[Darryle Clott]

And that – and I think that’s where, what – what is the motivation for that?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, people – people ask me. People really want to learn. People want to know. And I hope I can influence people a little bit.

[Darryle Clott]

So, you really are a Holocaust educator.

[Eva Schloss]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Darryle Clott]

Big time. Yes?

[Fox Valley staff referring to the microphone]

It died.

[Darryle Clott]

It died, okay.

[Fox Valley staff member]

They can tell me, and Ill tell you.

[Darryle Clott]

And then I’ll – Ill repeat it.

[Second elderly female audience member]

Your original homeland was Austria. Why, when you were liberated, did you not try to reunite back to your homeland and ended up going back to Amsterdam instead of Vienna? Whatever happened to your home in Austria?

[Darryle Clott]

Good question. She said your homeland was Austria, Vienna, and yet when you were liberated tried – you went back to Amsterdam, and she’s wondering why you didn’t try to go back to Austria, your homeland, and whatever happened to your place in Vienna?

[Eva Schloss]

Very good question. You know, when we were going, when the ship came and we were to register where we wanted to go to because, you know, were from all over Europe people were in – in Odessa, and we had to register and there was a Dutch doctor who volunteered to do this work. And when we said we wanted to go to Amsterdam, he said, But you are not Dutch, you shouldn’t come to Amsterdam, you go to Austria. And my mother said, I will never set foot again in this country. They didn’t want me, they threw us out, that’s past. And then we hoped because we had our things in – in Amsterdam that our father and brother would – that’s the place where they would go when they were liberated. And I did go to Austria later quite a few times. My youngest daughter wanted to see, but my mother really never went back there.

[Darryle Clott]

What about when you went back, I think it was with your granddaughter on a trip, and you – you were going to show her the address of this place.

[Eva Schloss]

With our daughter, our daughter.

[Darryle Clott]

Your daughter.

[Eva Schloss]

She was – it must be in the late ’70s we went to Vienna and Austria, and she wanted to see our home. And while I was in Vienna, the name of the street just was out of my mind. And I was – every night I was thinking, That’s ridiculous. I know I’ve lived there; I must know the name. And it was just blocked out. The minute I got back to England, I knew it. Louden Sacassa.

[laughter]

The Austrians didn’t return anything. They said they were victims themselves. The Germans, of course, paid a lot of reparation to victims. Gave pensions to people, and if you had property, sometimes you got the property back. Sometimes it was sold, and people got money for it and so on. But the Austrian Consulate in – in England said once, We should put a claim in, which we did, but we never heard about it.

[Darryle Clott]

Okay, we’re going to take three more questions, so.

[Teenaged female audience member]

Obviously, after World War II, there was a lot of turmoil in Europe, like poverty and many immigrants, but afterward there was quite a long period where the Iron Curtain was over much of Europe. And I was wondering how that affected your life, if at all, and how you felt when the Iron Curtain was finally lifted.

[Darryle Clott]

You’re really talking about: did Communism and the Iron Curtain affect her at all?

[Teenaged female audience member]

Yeah.

[Darryle Clott]

Did it at all?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, I didn’t affect us in England. Not this. But Germany, of course, very much so. But, you know, as I explained before, the consequences of the poverty of Germany in the First World War, after the war, the Americans didn’t want to make the same mistake. And you might have heard about the Marshall help, that Germany got – they didn’t have to pay any war damage. On the contrary, they got a lot of money, they got building material, and all the help they needed to rebuild Germany. And England, when I got in ’51 in England, it was still all the bomb damage because England had to pay back the war debt to America. I think just this year is the last payment which they were able to repay.

So, there was a bad feeling in England. You know, they said, We won the war but the Germans, the most wealthy country, and now as well, very awful, you know the Europe community, the southern countries are all extremely poor. England, too, has that problem. And Germany is the richest country now of the European Union. And very often people say Hitler would laugh if he would know what has happened, that Germany has achieved to be the most important country in Europe.

[Darryle Clott]

Right. What he wanted.

[Eva Schloss]

He’d say, Ah, no, really.

[Darryle Clott]

Yes.

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

My son was going to come with, but he couldn’t make it. So, he sent a question. He said, In order to survive, people must have found an inner strength and even perhaps a moment of normalcy in the day just to survive. Was it possible to find a little bit of happiness or a strange sense of joy despite all of the horror around you?”

[Darryle Clott]

In Auschwitz?

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

Yes.

[Darryle Clott]

Her son sent this question. He wasn’t able to come. You were surrounded by total degradation and horror in Auschwitz, and she – she’s wondering was it possible to find any sort of normalcy or joy while you were in Auschwitz?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, I can give a very short answer to that. No. Never. Never, never, never.

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

Just one more really short one. He wanted to know if, he said, “Did people fall in love?”

[Darryle Clott]

Did people in Auschwitz fall in love?

[Eva Schloss]

Well, men and women were in different camps.

[Darryle Clott]

They were separated.

[Eva Schloss]

They were separated. They were not together, no.

[Darryle Clott]

A lot of Holocaust survivors ended up falling in love later.

[Eva Schloss]

Afterwards. Afterwards.

[Second middle-aged female audience member with glasses]

Okay.

[Darryle Clott]

Later they were drawn together. For sure.

[Eva Schloss]

Afterwards, definitely. And people didn’t really want to marry people who hadn’t suffered similar things. There are, of course, some cases, but – its – and they say it’s very difficult to live with a Holocaust survivor. So, we seem to be difficult people, but I don’t think so. [laughs]

[laughter]

[Darryle Clott]

I don’t think so either. Yes?

[Teenaged male audience member with glasses]

If you could, what would you say to the Nazis who did this to you?

[Darryle Clott]

If you could, what would you say to the Nazis? Yeah, what would you say to the Nazis, if you could meet them now?

[Eva Schloss]

I would question them. How could they do things to them? You know, imagine it would happen to you. You know, we are all human beings. How can you be so cruel?

[Darryle Clott]

Thank you. We will be moving into the Raymond Theatre for – for a little meet and greet, if you want to meet Eva later, I mean like right now. And let’s give her another huge thank you.

[applause]