"The Charbor Chronicles": The Books of Eva Schloss & Reflections on Auschwitz and the Holocaust 70 Years Later

Some months ago, I had an opportunity to go see a lecture by Anne Frank's step sister, Mrs. Eva Schloss (see the picture of the flyer above). I jumped on the opportunity to see this event, as well as to cover it for the Guardian Liberty Voice, as well as right here on the Charbor Chronicles. How often will I get the chance to see and hear someone in person who is a Holocaust survivor or, more specifically, a survivor of Auschwitz? Since the liberation of Auschwitz happened 70 years ago, there has been some concern that this anniversary might be the last one when so many survivors were able to make the trip and participate in the ceremonies there.

Still, those ceremonies took place yesterday. Roughly 300 Auschwitz survivors returned to the death camp yesterday, under remarkably different circumstances than when they first arrived over seven decades ago. This time, having survived the notorious place, they had two messages for the world: never forget and never again.

It was the same message that Eva Schloss, the step sister of Anne Frank, had when I saw her give a talk last October.

Schloss has written several books on her experiences of the Holocaust, and I had the opportunity to read two of the: Eva's Story and The Promise.

In both, Schloss elaborates on those times, and her experiences and impressions as the Nazis took over in her home country of Austria during the Anschluss, her family's escape to Belgium, then the move to Netherlands, where she met Anne Frank. Anne's father, Otto Frank, would marry Eva's mother after the war, making Eva and Anne step sisters after the fact (Anne herself did not survive to witness the liberation of Auschwitz).

Schloss discussed in her books (and on the evening that I saw her) the family's being forced to go into hiding, and then the betrayal by a nurse that led to the arrest of the family and their being sent to Auschwitz.

Of course, she writes extensively about her actual experiences at Auschwitz, working at the Kanada section, where she would rummage through the personal belongings of other Jews brought to (and mostly killed at) the Auschwitz death camp.

Schloss also discusses the end of her ordeal at Auschwitz, remembering the odd experience of seeing the first Russian soldier, whom she at first mistook for a bear. She recalls her first meal under the Russians, then being taken out of Auschwitz and further east, into what would soon be absorbed into the Soviet Union. She recalls the postwar years, and her own struggles with serious depression, which at one point brought her close to suicide, until she realized the absurdity and unfairness of someone surviving something as traumatic as Auschwitz only to take her own life a few years later.

These were good and informative reads, and the evening was an illuminating and moving experience. If you get the chance to see Mrs. Schloss, I recommend that you go ahead and see her. If not, go ahead and read her books, to learn firsthand what those times were actually like to live through.

Here is the article I wrote on the event for Guardian Liberty Voice:

Eva Schloss Talks About Holocaust and Being Anne Frank’s Stepsister:

http://guardianlv.com/2014/10/eva-schloss-talks-about-holocaust-and-being-anne-franks-stepsister/

As an aside, but related, please take a look at the article I wrote for Guardian Liberty Voice (my first in over a month and a half!) on the subject of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz:

Auschwitz Liberation 70 Year Anniversary

http://guardianlv.com/2015/01/auschwitz-liberation-70-year-anniversary/

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 Wannsee 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!