"The Charbor Chronicles": Eva Schloss, Anne Frank's Stepsister, Reflects on Auschwitz and the Holocaust

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Eva Schloss, Anne Frank's Stepsister, Reflects on Auschwitz and the Holocaust

On the evening of October 27th, Eva Schloss spoke about surviving the Holocaust and Auschwitz, as well as her famous stepsister to Anne Frank, spoke at

After her talk, I started reading her book Eva's Story, which I admittedly had not read before (nor even heard of before hearing of this speaking engagement, I am sorry to admit). But I reflected on what she said. Some of the new things that I had learned, such as that some Jews had tried to throw their support behind Hitler and get in with him when he first came to power, apparently not taking the anti-Semitic parts of his platform all that seriously.

I thought about my trip last year to Auschwitz (which I reviewed on July 25, 2013), and seeing that place in person. You hear so much about the horrors there, such as the showers and the ovens. There was an execution wall, where people were lined up to be killed. But I also remember seeing some things that hit me like never before about the grim reality of the horror. There were these very tiny makeshift rooms that, if you did not know any better, looked like chimneys, with little openings on the bottom. Some poor Jews, after working all day doing surely exhausting work, would have to crawl in there and share that kind of a space with up to three other guys. That meant that it was so tight in there, it was standing room only. They would have to spend the night, crammed and standing all night long in the pitch black. What provokes people to do such things to others?

The thing is, though, that when you are born and grew up after such a huge event like World War II, it begins to feel almost surreal. The events already happened, and they swell to an almost mythic proportion. The battles, the names of places and events and the prominent people. All of it seems like it could have happened no other way, and that is when it becomes immobile history.

What we need to understand with all of this is that these events really happened. Living people made decisions under often difficult circumstances. Some decisions were good, and showed strength. Some were bad, and showed cruelty. Those who came to the conclusion that a "final solution" to exterminate the Jews was needed at the Wannasee Conference made decisions, and the death camps were constructed as a result.

With Eva Schloss, you have a real life person who actually lived through such horrific events. She and her family, like her famous stepsister Anne Frank and that family, had their lives interrupted because of the huge, larger than life events going on around them. The Nazis have earned their reputation as the ultimate bad guys, and we still see them featured in this role often today in books and movies and even comic books, nearly seven full decades after these events finally came to a close. We know how they took over and occupied much of Europe. But when you see someone in the flesh, who lived through it all as a victim, and managed, against all odds, to survive, it brings it home in a way that other things simply cannot.

Seeing someone in the flesh, as I did a couple of weeks ago with Eva Schloss, and as I did some years ago when I went to see Elie Wiesel, makes you aware that these events, these tragedies, happened in real life, and not just in movies or books. They affected real people, who's everyday lives were disturbed because of the ideologies of hatred from people that managed to get into power, and to wage a war against the people that they hated, taking over more and more territory in Europe, and wiping out the Jewish population as they went.

It is a testament to the human spirit that some people did nonetheless manage to survive to tell their tale, as both Eva Schloss and Elie Wiesel (as well as others that I did not see, such as Primo Levi) did, writing books that will immortalize these events forever, so that we should never forget.

I would recommend, however, going to see any presentations or lectures such as this one by Holocaust survivors. After all, these events were a long time ago, and people who were around back then and old enough to remember many of these events are starting to be sparse, let alone people like Eva Schloss that were very directly affected, and had their lives interrupted by what we now view as history. It was a very interesting night and discussion! At the very least, pick up a book on the subject, so that you can get a better grasp on exactly what happened, and make sure that people do not forget!