Eva Schloss
My stepsister, Anne Frank, would have been 90 today
Before the Gestapo came for Anne Frank, before her family was sent to Auschwitz, before she slipped into the eternal midnight of the six million murdered – her father gave her a diary for her 13th birthday. You would expect it to be a chronicle of terror; instead it contains the quirky musings of a girl living through the Holocaust, while refusing to be defined by it.
“It’s really a family story,” says 90-year-old Eva Schloss, Anne’s childhood friend. “It allows people to learn a little bit, without the horror.”
Today, Schloss (née Geiringer) lives in a north London flat, surrounded by photographs. Like Anne – who would have been 90 today – she had a happy childhood. But that changed once Hitler marched his troops into Vienna.
“When I was nine, I went to my Catholic friend’s house but her mother said, ‘we never want to see you again’ and slammed the door. My brother was attacked by his schoolmates and his teachers watched,” she recalls. Her father, who ran a shoe factory, knew they had to escape.
Otto Frank, Anne’s father, felt similar dread in 1933, when he saw Nazis parading through Frankfurt, singing: “when Jewish blood begins to drip from our knives, things will be good again”.
Both families fled to Amsterdam, where they became neighbours.
“Anne was a chatterbox. She would assemble the kids and tell stories,” Eva says. “She was lively… she organised things and wanted everyone to follow.”
The children weren’t scared, she adds, because “our parents were very protective. When people disappeared, we didn’t know where they had gone.”
But when the Nazis ratcheted up their arrests of Jews, both families had
‘There was always the ghost of Anne living with us. After the war, I was full of hatred’
to vanish. The Franks hid in an annex in Otto’s office, helped by employee Miep Gies. Eva’s family hid in pairs. “My father told me the chance two of us would survive was greater,” she says. “It was the first time I realised it was life or death. I was 13.”
After two years, in May 1944, the Geiringers were arrested.
The Franks were discovered that August. At Auschwitz, the families were torn apart. “Anne adored her father,” says Eva. Being cut off from him “would have been unbearable”. Children, pregnant women and the sick, were sent to the gas chambers. “My miracle is that a woman on the train gave my mother a hat with a big rim,” Eva says. “Because of that, [SS physician] Josef Mengele couldn’t tell how young I was. If he had, I would have been murdered.”
Those who tried to escape were hanged – the others made to watch. “The cruelty of the SS guards is something I will never comprehend,” says Eva. Women threw themselves on the electric fence to commit suicide. Did she ever consider it? “No. I wanted to get married, have a family. That was how I survived. Never giving up hope.”
In 1945, the darkest hour ended. “One morning, we woke up and there were no dogs barking and no shouting. The gates were open and it was deserted.” Eva’s brother, Heinz, and father Erich hadn’t made it. Otto was the only annex survivor; both his daughters had died. Anne was last seen sitting in a blanket, as her clothes were covered in lice. She was 15.
“Anne wrote that ‘in spite of everything… people are truly good at heart’,” Eva says. “If she had survived, I don’t think she would have believed that any more. It was too evil.”
Eva and her mother, Fritzi returned to Holland. Otto also found his way back, where Gies gave him Anne’s diary. In 1953, he married Fritzi, making Eva Anne’s posthumous stepsister. In her 2013 autobiography, After Auschwitz, Eva wrote that it could be a “burden”, explaining that Otto often said “Anne would have done it this way… there was always this ghost living with us.”
She also wrote about having a miscarriage and her mother’s decision to stay with Otto and “do Anne Frank business,” rather than come home.
But if there were frustrations, Eva now speaks with love. “After the war, I was full of hatred,” she says. “I didn’t believe in humanity or God.” It was Otto who warned that bitterness would consume her. In 1951, he sent Eva to work for a photographer in London, where she met her late husband, Zvi, to whom she was married for 63 years.
Since Otto’s death in 1980, Eva has dedicated her life to peace, co-founding The Anne Frank Trust in 1991. Does she worry about anti-semitism now? “No,” she says, adding inequality “can lead to antisemitism. But we have a chance for a better world. We should appreciate what
we’ve got.”