TELLING HER STORY
`Many, many people could have been saved'
Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor and stepsister of diarist Anne Frank, will share her own story with an Oklahoma City audience next month
Holocaust survivor will share her story and lessons for the world
For decades, Eva Schloss didn't talk about Auschwitz.
She knew she had a story to tell, but it wasn't pretty and no one who endured the Holocaust discussed its horrors early on.
One day, she began to give an account of her ordeal — and people listened.
The Holocaust survivor and stepsister of diarist Anne Frank has been sharing her story ever since.
In a recent telephone interview from her London home, the 92-year-old discussed Anne's book, her own story and the message she hopes to share with an Oklahoma City audience on Nov. 21.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Your mother Elfriede Geiringer and Anne's father Otto Frank married after World War II, after their spouses were killed in the Holocaust. You knew Anne
before the Holocaust, before her death. Were you close?
A: We were not that close, but we were 11-year-old girls and we played together. I didn't know her when she was already living in Holland for a long time. She was not in the local school where I was. She had a lot of friends from her school, having already been there for so long, and she had friends where she lived but we all played together — gossiped together, skipped, played marbles and things like that.
Q: Why do you think Anne's diary has resonated with so many people through the years?
A: Survivors didn't talk about it. They didn't write books about it. Elie Wiesel, who is one of the of the most famous writers from the Holocaust, he didn't write until the '60s or '70s. And then his books were not a best-seller — it was too horrible. But the diary was the first book to come out in America in the early '50s, and it was a story about a little girl who had been hiding. It was not a Holocaust story yet. She doesn't write about the terrible things that were happening outside. People started to get interested in the war and what had happened but didn't want to know any depth or any detail and the diary was a book that came out at the right time to know something but not really the horrors.
Q: When did you know that you had a story to share?
A: I knew that I had a story but I was not ready to talk about it, you know? I didn't feel comfortable about it. At first people after the war didn't really want to hear. They had suffered a lot — everybody in Europe — the bombings, the food shortage, the losing of soldiers and so on. It was really a very tough life, a tough world and when (Holocaust) victims came back from the camps, they didn't really want to know their horror stories. So when I was 16, I came back and wanted to tell people of how I suffered, but they did not want to know. Not just me, all the victims, it was the same thing — (we) suppressed it and said well, we just have to live with it. Then 20, 30 years later, once people started to ask, we were not ready any more. Only after 40 years, in 1986, when an Anne Frank exhibition from Holland came to London and I was invited and asked to say something. I didn't want to and it was really, really difficult for me, but eventually I did. It was a great relief, and I was able to talk about it. I felt better that it was in the open. Then people said well, you have an interesting story to tell, as well, you should really write a book. And that is how I started to write my first book (“Eva's Story”), and I must say since then I've felt completely relieved of this burden that I had carried with me for 40 years.
Q: How did you endure the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp?
A: This is very important: I had a wonderful,
loving upbringing when I was a child.
Unfortunately, now with all these computers and things that you get on your mobile phone, people have no time for each other any more. In the camp, I really wanted to get a boyfriend, I wanted to get married and have my own family and bring them up like I was, with love and care. That's why I never, ever gave up hope that I would make it. But having said that, there was, as well, a lot of luck — you know little things like a piece of bread found on the floor or somebody gave me a drink of water when I really needed it or some kindness. With luck I was able to succeed and get out of it (concentration camp) because we were not supposed to.
Q: What message do you share with your audiences?
A: Of course, people will learn how it was difficult, and many, many people could have been saved if the free countries like Canada, America, Australia, these are big countries, but there are smaller countries who could have let refugees come to their country. That was really the whole disaster of the Holocaust, that Hitler realized that nobody wanted Jews. The only way to get rid of them — he didn't want to kill people first — he just wanted no Jews in his superior state. His wonderful German Aryan race were more superior than everybody else, and he didn't want anyone else to live there. So if the Jews could have gone anywhere else, it would have been OK, but since
no one wanted to let the Jews in, they (Nazis) came up with this horrible, horrible decision to kill the Jews. They came together, all the Nazi leaders, and decided that the cheapest, quickest way of getting rid of millions of people was to gas them. For young people, it is very important to know that not everybody agreed with what Hitler was doing, but they were bystanders. Young people have to realize they are in democracies in the West, and
they have a say. If they don't agree with something that's going on, they have a voice. We have to say `We don't accept this and you have to change.' If enough people protest what is going on, then the government will have to change.
Q: Why is this work so important to you?
A: I've done this now for many, many years, and I get amazing letters from people who are moved by what I was saying. They say they realize that they were wrong, and they are going to change their attitude and help to make a safer and better world. If I wouldn't get any feedback, I would say `Well, perhaps it's a waste of my time,' but I realize people want to hear me. That's why I carry on. I know I can't change the world; I'm not conceited about such things. But I can change quite a few attitudes of people. I have hope. I'm an optimist about that.