Anne Frank’s stepsister, Eva Schloss, recounts horrors of Auschwitz 75 years after liberation
The peace activist and international speaker recounts how she was torn from her happy childhood in Vienna and ‘saved’ from the concentration camp’s angel of death, Josef Mengele, by a hat
Nazi invasion: I was born in Vienna, into a young family. My father was 21 when he married my mother, who was 18. They had their first child, Heinz, in 1926 and I was born in 1929. My brother and I were quite different – I was a real tomboy and he was calmer and quieter.
In winter we went skiing and in summer we had relatives who owned a spa bath near Vienna where we went at weekends. We were Jewish, but not particularly religious. My parents had Christian friends and went drinking in the evening with them. It was a wonderful life, but it didn’t last, because in 1938 Hitler marched into Austria.
Soon after the Nazis arrived my brother came home from school badly beaten, blood streaming from his face. He said his school friends had done it and the teachers watched and did nothing. My father hatched a plan: he had inherited a shoe factory from his father and was exporting shoes to the south of Holland. He would go there and as soon as he found accommodation would send for us. But within a couple of weeks the borders were closed. Jewish people were attacked in the streets, it wasn’t safe, and I had to leave school.
Meeting Anne Frank: My mother, brother and I went to Belgium illegally – by train and on foot. I was 10 and didn’t realise the danger we were in. My father arranged for us to stay in a boarding house. I went to a Belgian school. I didn’t understand a word of French. At playtime the children stared at me, it was awful. I became shy and miserable, I felt I didn’t belong.