File:2013 Schloss.jpg

Eva's Story (1988)

The Promise (2006)

{en} Eva Schloss. After Auschwitz (2013).

Abstract

Eva was arrested by the Nazis on her fifteenth birthday and sent to Auschwitz. Her survival depended on endless strokes of luck, her own determination and the love and protection of her mother Fritzi, who was deported with her.

When Auschwitz was liberated, Eva and Fritzi began the long journey home. They searched desperately for Eva's father and brother, from whom they had been separated. The news came some months later. Tragically, both men had been killed.

Before the war, in Amsterdam, Eva had become friendly with a young girl called Anne Frank. Though their fates were very different, Eva's life was set to be entwined with her friend's for ever more, after her mother Fritzi married Anne's father Otto Frank in 1953.

This is a searingly honest account of how an ordinary person survived the Holocaust. Eva's memories and descriptions are heartbreakingly clear, her account brings the horror as close as it can possibly be.

But this is also an exploration of what happened next, of Eva's struggle to live with herself after the war and to continue the work of her step-father Otto, ensuring that the legacy of Anne Frank is never forgotten.

About the author

• wikipedia.en -- wikipedia.it

• See Eva Schloss / Eva Geiringer (F / Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, 1929), Holocaust survivor.

• Stepsister of Anne Frank

• KEYWORDS : <Austria> <Refugees> <Belgium> <Netherlands> <Hidden Children> <Auschwitz> <Liberation of Auschwitz>

• MEMOIRS : Eva's Story (1988) -- The Promise (2006) -- After Auschwitz (2013)

Eva Geiringer was born May 11, 1929 in Vienna to a Jewish family. Shortly after the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, her family emigrated to Belgium and finally to the Netherlands. She lived in the same apartment block in Amsterdam as Anne Frank, and the girls, only a month apart in age, were sometimes playmates from ages 11 to 13. In 1942, both girls went into hiding to avoid the Nazi effort to capture the Jews of Amsterdam. In May 1944, Schloss's family was captured by the Nazis after being betrayed by a double agent in the Dutch underground, and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camps. Her father and brother did not survive the ordeal, but she and her mother were barely alive when they were freed in 1945 by Soviet troops.

They returned to Amsterdam. In November 1953, Schloss's mother Elfriede (1905–1998) married Otto Frank. Eva continued her schooling and then studied art history at the University of Amsterdam. She then traveled to England to study photography for a year. While there, she met and married Zvi Schloss, a Jewish refugee from Germany whose father was imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp, and who had been living in Palestine. The couple subsequently settled in England.