Eva Schloss, Anne Frank's stepsister, tells story to sellout Memphis crowd
She wears it on her left arm because it's a part of who she is, a painful reminder of how she got here. A532. It was the number the Nazis tattooed on 15-year-old Eva Schloss when she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For them, it was a way to take away her humanity and reduce her to a product code — a bookkeeping measure, in effect, that would identify her among the sea of flesh-and-blood inventory.
"I kept it because it's a part of me," the now 89-year-old Schloss said Oct. 16. "For those who deny the Holocaust ever happened, I would never do this to myself."
Schloss, the stepsister of Anne Frank, brought her powerful story of holding on to the past but letting go of hatred to the Rose Theatre at the University of Memphis.
Chabad Center for Jewish Life brought Schloss to Memphis, with cosponsors Facing History and Ourselves, the National Civil Rights Museum and the Unknown Child Foundation. Corporate sponsors included The Commercial Appeal, FedEx and Baptist Healthcare.
Schloss said camp operators later changed her camp number and struck the "3" tattooed on her arm, replacing it with a "7." Many concentration camp survivors had the tattoos removed after liberation, but Schloss said it helps her know who she is.
It was just one of many details Schloss, an author of three books who now lives in London, shared with moderator Joe Birch of WMC-TV and the sellout Rose Theatre crowd.
'Difficult days of endurance'
Schloss began her nearly hour-long conversation on a lighter note, recounting the "really idyllic life" she had with her mother, father and brother in Amsterdam before Germany invaded in 1940. She lived in the same apartment block as Frank, and the two — only a month apart in age — would sometimes spend time together between the ages of 11 and 13.
After the Nazi occupation, the families went into hiding before being captured in 1944 and sent to concentration camps. On Schloss' 15th birthday, her "difficult days of endurance" began and lasted until the Russian army liberated the camp in January 1945.
Among the painful memories of time in the camp that Schloss has held onto over the years:
❚ "The train journey (to the camp) was horrific," Schloss recalled. She described roughly 80 people packed into something less than a cattle car. Once a day, the doors were opened and chunks of bread thrown in, though not enough to feed 80 people. There was one bucket for water, one for bodily waste.
❚ In the camp, prisoners would stand outside in the cold in rows of five as Dr. Josef Mengele inspected to see who would go in one line to live, who in another to die. Schloss recalled her mother gave her a coat that helped her look older than she was. That helped her survive.
❚ Her father wasn't a religious man, Schloss recalled, but told her when she was taken away that "God will take care of you now."
Schloss and her mother survived the time in the camp. Her father and brother did not.
Looking at the world in a 'very different way'
After liberation, Schloss continued her studies and, in 1951, moved to London to train as a photographer. She married the late Zvi Schloss in 1952. A year later, her mother married Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father with whom Schloss and her mother had rekindled the two families' pre-captivity friendship in Amsterdam. Frank was still coping with the loss of his entire family.
Her experiences shaped the person she became, Schloss said, causing her to look at the world in a "very different way."
"For many, many years, I hated not only the Nazis but really the whole world," Schloss said, noting that other countries could have taken more Jewish immigrants to help prevent the extent of the Holocaust.
But she said Otto Frank, as her stepfather, helped her understand the need to let go of the hate while having the courage to speak up. That's what Schloss has spent her life trying to do, spreading her message of remembrance and understanding to audiences worldwide.
"If we see discrimination, we have to have the courage to speak up and say this has gone too far," Schloss told the crowd to end her presentation.
An 'age of darkness'
Rabbi Levi Klein, director of Chabad of Tennessee, said bringing Schloss to Memphis was too important an opportunity to pass up when it was learned she was coming to the U.S. and to the state. Schloss spoke in Nashville Oct. 11, and she was in Chattanooga earlier in the day Oct. 16. Schloss also has spoken in Knoxville.
"We're living in an age of darkness," Klein said. "There's a lot of darkness in the world and even Holocaust denial. I think any person who hears somebody of this caliber is a changed person. It changes who they are how they see the world. And our goal is to make the world a better place."