Step-sister of Anne Frank - about the Holocaust and life in a concentration camp

Anna Frank, a Jewish girl who wrote a diary that became a symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust, died in a concentration camp in 1945. Her half-sister Eva Schloss survived, but was able to talk about the experience only after forty years, reports Voice of America.

Eva Schloss calls her childhood idyllic. Born in Catholic Austria, a country that encouraged Jewish emigration, the girl was very close with her parents and brother. Everything changed in 1938 when Hitler entered Austria.

She remembers how fast the swastika, the greeting of “Heil Hitler!” and persecution of the Jews became the norm.

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In 1940, the whole family managed to move to Amsterdam. There she met and became friends with Anna Frank, a girl whose memories of life during the Holocaust in the Netherlands became world famous.

“She was a big talker and at school they called her ‘Mrs. She didn't stop talking. We were both 11 years old at the time, and she was already very interested in the attention of boys,” Eva Schloss shares her memories.

Soon the Germans occupied the Netherlands. Restrictions were introduced for Jews - a ban on travel by public transport, and the need to wear a yellow six-pointed star on clothes.

In 1942, the Eve family began to hide. After two years of wandering in different houses, they were handed over to the Nazis by a Danish nurse who sheltered the family, who turned out to be a German agent. They were sent to the Auschwitz camp, and there they were divided. Eva and her mother were in the female part of the camp, father and older brother - in the male.

“We were coming out of the shower and Dr. Mengele was waiting for us, this meant that now there would be a selection. We turned naked in a circle in front of him while he made his decision. Mom fed me her bread, and I passed the selection. She herself and 40 other women who arrived at the camp with us were sent to the gas chamber that day,” said Eva.

Eva's mother survived in that gas chamber, her father and older brother died. Eva herself says that she survived only thanks to the Soviet army: “After the Germans left, we were left to our own devices for ten days. People died and froze. One day, at the gate, we noticed a huge creature, covered in fur and with icicles. From a distance we thought it was a bear. It turned out that it was a Russian intelligence officer.”

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After the war ended, Eve and her mother returned to Amsterdam, where they again met Otto Frank, who had lost his entire family in the camp. He was looking for an opportunity to publish the diaries of his deceased daughter, Anna, and came across a wall of misunderstanding, because, as Eva recalls, people were not ready to hear this terrible story.

The book was published in 1947, making Anna Frank the symbol of one and a half million Jewish children who did not survive the Holocaust. Years later, Eve's mom married her husband to Otto Frank. And Eve, who thus became the half-sister of the deceased Anna, only forty years later was able to begin to talk about what she had experienced, which she never ceased to see all these years in nightmares.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• Found secret records Anne Frank on sex and prostitution, which she disguised in a diary
• Like the USA keep memory Holocaust victims
• From slaughter to vengeance: Why the world still does not understand The Holocaust
• Pages of History: Anne Frank's Family tried to run from the Nazis in the USA, but could not get a visa

Read also on ForumDaily:

How the daughter of Holocaust survivors helped 10 U.S. immigrants

'They read my mother's letters to me': stories of those who saved Jews from the Holocaust, risking their lives

"We knew what was waiting for us there": 80 years ago, Jews tried to escape from Nazism, but the US refused to accept them

As the mother-in-law of the Queen of Britain saved the Jews during the war and became the righteous of the world

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