I oversle t.. & didn’t join the Death March
Anne Frank’s step-sister on how she survived horrors of the camp
The Franks were discovered in September. Both families ended up in Auschwitz, but didn’t meet. Eva’s last memory of Anne is of the bubbly girl brandishing the diary which would, published by her father after the war, make her world-famous.
Eva survived selection for the gas chambers because her mother gave her a wide-brimmed hat to hide her youth. “That was the first miracle,” she says.
Every detail of Auschwitz remains crystal clear. “The filth, the dirt, no toilets. If they caught you sitting on a bucket you would be beaten. The indignity,” she recalls, sitting in her incongruously cosy North London flat.
“The lice. We became covered in scabs and boils. And the starvation,” she says. “The cup of liquid in the morning, the chunk of bread at night.”
Eva describes the growing sense of chaos in December 1944. “We realised the Nazis were nervous,” she says. “A lot of the guards ran away.”
One night they announced they’d be leaving on a march, and Birkenau, the women’s sub-camp, was to be burned. It wasn’t, and they were left behind.
“The camp was deserted, no dogs barking. There was dead silence,” Eva explains. There were around 500 prisoners left in Birkenau, she believes, and the same in the men’s camp.
Eva remembers no other children. The only food was dregs. “There was
pa small pond and we hacked the ice to get water,” says Eva. Deaths were daily. The memory that terrorised Eva for years was moving bodies. “We had to heap them up. I tried to close their eyelids, but they were frozen,” she says.
When the Soviets arrived she was joyful because she longed for food. “It was too soon to feel any joy of survival,” she says. “They gave us metal bowls of cabbage soup with strong bacon fat. We ate, and ate, and ate.”
The eating after months of starvation led to tragedy. “In the morning there were dead people,” Eva says. In the men’s camp, she saw Otto Frank. “He looked terrible,” Eva recalls. “He was asking, ‘Have you seen my girls?’”
Two weeks later, the Soviets started transporting them to Odessa, now in Ukraine. The troops gave them their uniforms for warmth – Eva kept hers for years. And as the women gained weight, they provided bras, she giggles.
“It made me feel human, like a woman again,” she says. One night, the soldiers struck up music. “They showed me how to dance,” she says. “I began to feel like myself again.”
In 2003, she was to be reunited with some of them in Russia. But it was to be many years before she found happiness. Learning her father and brother, Erich and Heinz, had died left her depressed, and she considered suicide.
But slowly, after Otto came into her mother’s life and they married, and Eva married, she says: “I realised how lucky I was.” Yet the shadow cast by her step-sister’s fame was difficult.
“I was always introduced as Anne’s step-sister. I thought, ‘I have a name – and I survived’,” she admits. But she grew to accept her legacy.
Eva, who has three daughters and five grandchildren, says: “I thought, ‘I’ve a good life, a husband, children. How can I be jealous of someone who was killed before she was even 15?’”
But, she adds, softly: “If the Russians had not arrived just when they did, I would not be sitting here today.”
■ Eva co-founded the Anne Frank Trust, and gives talks warning about prejudice. Visit annefrank.org.uk