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| Eva Schloss (second to the left), posing with young hosts last night |
This is Eva Schloss (nee Geiringer) who is 90 years old. She is a survivor of the holocaust, and is in Hong Kong this week to talk to mostly students about her experience in the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
She spoke last night at the Asia Society to a packed house mostly filled with secondary students who asked some good questions and she answered every one of them.
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| Schloss spoke to a room filled mostly with students |
Schloss has a connection to Anne Frank. The two were the same age, Schloss a month older, and they played together from when they were 11 to 13 years old, when their families went into hiding in 1942.
She remembers Anne as a storyteller with a vivid imagination, a chatterbox and a young flirt. Later after the war, Schloss lost her father and older brother, and she and her mother re-connected with Anne's father, Otto Frank; subsequently Schloss's mother married Frank. So in a way Schloss became Anne's step-sister... if she was still alive.
In May 1929, Schloss was born in Vienna, and when Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, Schloss's family moved to Belgium and then eventually the Netherlands in 1940, where she met Anne.
Schloss's family went into hiding in 1942 in seven different places, but two years later they were betrayed by a Dutch nurse who turned out to be a double agent for the Nazis. She was awarded 5 gilders for every Jew arrested. She betrayed 200 people.
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| Schloss when she was young, before she was arrested |
When they were captured, the men and women were separated and that was the last time Schloss saw her father and brother, while she and her mother managed to stay together throughout their entire ordeal in the concentration camp.
After they arrived, they were immediately inspected, the young and old were immediately taken away and gassed. Schloss's first miracle was that she wore a wide brimmed hat and coat so that at first glance the Nazis couldn't tell she was young.
But the conditions in the camp she says were horrific. There were eight people per bunk bed so you could barely move and the beds were covered in bed bugs and lice. That led to lots of scratching and the bugs would suck on the blood of the open wounds...
They were forced to wake up at 4am or 5am for roll call, stand outside with no coat or hat (their heads were shaven) and stand for two hours while names were called out. If anyone was missing, the roll call would start all over again and they stood there for another two hours.
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| Anne Frank's father Otto later became Schloss's stepfather |
"If you moved, you were beaten," she said matter-of-fact. And the roll call happened everyday. Then breakfast consisted of "some liquid of soup or sour milk the Nazi soldiers didn't finish" and that was it, and the work began.
The women did heavy labour, like road building, digging, carrying rocks around. "Our heads were burned because our heads were shaven. We were not allowed to talk and we had no lunch," Schloss explains, and no toilet breaks either. "You were just trying to stay alive."
At 9pm they finally returned to the barracks and supper was a big piece of bread. "You couldn't keep the bread, you had to eat it, because there was no where to keep the leftover bread for later. If you tried to sleep with your bread and it fell out of the bunk, someone else would eat it."
It was like this everyday and Schloss explains they didn't know the day or the week or even the month, but could guess from the seasons. They were constantly starving.
Sometimes they would wake up with a dead body next to them -- Schloss had to carry out a few corpses during her time. "You'd wonder if it would be me tomorrow, and I had nightmares about it. Their eyelids were still open, because they were frozen."
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| Schloss remembers Anne as a storyteller and flirt |
One time during a roll call, Schloss's mother was chosen to go to the gas chambers, and Schloss thought that she had lost the will to live losing her mother. But somehow thanks to luck, her mother managed to avoid death and be reunited with Schloss until they were liberated by the Russians on January 27, 1945.
Afterwards she and her mother managed to get back to their home completely broke, and realized soon after that her father and brother were dead. Her mother was very practical and rented out a room in the home to two women, and she also got a job as a secretary but she didn't know how to use a typewriter at all. She would bring home stacks of paper that she had ruined with mistakes, too scared to throw them out in the office.
As for Schloss she went back to school, three years behind, and then went to the UK to study photography, where she met her future husband, Zvi Schloss at the boarding house they both stayed at. They went on to have three daughters and now have five grandchildren.
However, after the war, Schloss was very depressed and angry. She could not listen to German, refused to visit Germany. She also was disillusioned about her religion. She had been taught that Jews were the "chosen ones" and yet God did not save them from the concentration camps.
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| Schloss signing a book for a young fan |
Today she will go to synagogue periodically and is passionate about being Jewish, but is not very religious.
"After the war I was more depressed than when I was in the camps," Schloss says. It was Otto Frank who told her to try not to be so angry. "Otto told me to go out and see there are wonderful people in the world."
He was very proud of Anne's diary and showed it to friends who encouraged him to publish it, though it took him a while to decide to actually do that. It is now published in 70 languages, and even the bookstore around the corner from their home is also famous, as it is where the diary was bought as a birthday present to Anne. The diary was bequeathed to the Dutch government after Otto Frank died in 1980.
For decades Schloss didn't speak about her experiences, not even to her own children. It wasn't until 35 years ago that she attended a traveling exhibition about the holocaust in London, and Otto Frank had passed. At the event Schloss was asked to speak and she was terrified. But she started talking and realized it was a relief for her to talk about her experiences, releasing the feelings she had suppressed for so many years.
Eventually she wrote a book,
Eva's Story and three others to ensure her life was documented. "I had nightmares all the time, but after I wrote
Eva's Story, the nightmares stopped," she says.
She refused to travel to Germany but eventually went there again for holocaust events. After hearing her experiences, young children asked her, "Will you ever forgive us?"
Schloss realized the children had learned what had happened and understood what the Nazis had done. "I will never forgive your grandparents, but you are innocent," she replied.
In subsequent visits and meetings with other people involved in the war that some people were forced to become Nazis -- Schloss learned they did not want to kill people but were following orders. She blames propaganda for making people get so caught up in the movement.
One student asked Schloss what she thought of the Japanese refusing to apologize for the atrocities they committed against the Chinese during World War II.
She said that the Japanese had not learned their lesson yet, unlike the Germans. Schloss also praised Angela Merkel for taking in 1 million refugees into Germany, unlike other European countries that refused them.
What kept her going in the concentration camp? She says it was her stubbornness and hope. "You can't live without hope," Schloss says.
True that.
