Four decades passed before Anne Frank’s stepsister began talking publicly about her life during and after the Holocaust.
It happened during an Anne Frank memorial event in England. “Everything I had repressed for over 40 years came blabbing out,” Eva Schloss, 90, said during a talk Thursday night at the JW Marriott Las Vegas.
Frank is considered among the first Holocaust victims to have their story told.
Schloss told a ballroom full of people about Otto Frank’s difficult decision to publish his daughter’s famous diary.
“At first, that was something people didn’t really want to know about,” she said.
The author of three books including “The Promise,” Schloss has devoted the rest of her days to keeping alive the memories of all the people she lost during the Holocaust.
“I eventually found my own voice,” Schloss said.
After the Russian military liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945, Schloss said she went looking in the men’s barracks for her father. She found a man she thought she recognized. It was Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father.
The Frank family and Schloss’ family went into hiding together in 1940.
Her family connected with Frank’s family because Otto Frank spoke fluent German and Schloss’ family was from Austria but didn’t know anybody in Amsterdam, Schloss said.
The girls met at school before they had to go into hiding from the Nazis. “She was a big, big chatterbox,” Schloss said, eliciting laughs from the crowd Thursday night.
After they were captured in Amsterdam by Nazis in 1944, they were taken to Auschwitz in Poland, where Schloss’ father and brother were killed, along with Anne and her mother. Years after the war, Otto Frank married Schloss’ mother.
On Thursday, Schloss recounted the day they were captured. She was sitting down having breakfast when Nazis knocked on their door. Inside a cattle car, Schloss and her family were packed with about 80 people on the way to Auschwitz.
“The only good thing in the transport was we were together as a family,” Schloss said.
Schloss said she shares her story because the she believes people across the world have not truly learned lessons from the Holocaust.
Last year in California, Schloss visited with the Newport Beach high school students who were caught giving Nazi salutes near red plastic cups arranged in a swastika. Her message to the teens, which made national headlines, was to ensure new generations understand the trauma people endured during the Holocaust.
“I was their age when I realized my life was completely shattered and I would never have a family again,” Schloss told news media.
chloss took part in answering thousands of questions as part of the “Dimensions in Testimony” project by the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. The project aims to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors. Students will be able to ask a hologram version of Schloss questions about her time under Nazi rule.
