Eva Schloss - Surviving Auschwitz & The Holocaust

Full transcript: Eva Schloss on London Real

0:00 Eva Schloss: I remember the SS marching through the street singing, “When Jewish blood drips from our knives, then everything is going to get better.”

The Germans really wanted to catch every Jew. I was with my mother, hiding in a little room, and they just stormed in. The next day we were taken east. When the train stopped we jumped down, we saw we were on a platform, and it was Auschwitz.

And the next command was: men and women to different sides. It was the last time we were together as a family.

Sometimes we woke up and people next to us had died in their sleep. I nearly gave up. But I was stubborn. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to experience life.

And one day, when the Russians were coming, the Germans fled, taking most of the inmates with them. It was a miracle that we didn’t go.

After the war I was very angry with the whole world. People could have helped.

We still do terrible things, but we have hope that things will get different. I’ve got a good tip for President Trump: if he wants to make America great again, he has to get people educated. We have to learn from history.

Brian Rose: They say that the human race is doomed, that we have lost touch with our true nature, that the media has corrupted us and that the planet has no future. I disagree. I believe that humanity is full of hope, and that our salvation lies within each one of us.

My name is Brian Rose, and my job is to listen, the oldest method of learning known to man. Each week I seek out individuals who are changing the world, people who are living and thinking in a different way. Their stories will challenge your beliefs, make you question your choices, and perhaps inspire you to change.

I never planned on doing any of this, but now I can’t stop. Join me on this mission, and make humanity something we can all be proud of.

3:18 [London Real promo removed]

4:20 Eva Schloss is extremely unique because she is one of the few remaining Holocaust survivors. She’s also the stepsister of Anne Frank, whom you know from The Diary of Anne Frank, the story of a young girl in hiding in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. I’m so glad I had this conversation with Eva, because it’s easy to forget what happened when you don’t have it told by someone who was there.

Eva has a harrowing story. She grew up in Austria, everything was OK, and she slowly watched the Nazi party come into power. She went into hiding in Holland, and then on her 15th birthday she was snatched out of her house and shipped to Auschwitz, where she spent a year in captivity fearing for her life every single day. She was separated from her mother, her father and her brother, but then she was liberated by the Russians and made it out.

When she described it, it sounded like the most incredible year anyone could have in their life, full of despair and terror and trauma. She met the doctor Josef Mengele. She thought she was going to die almost every single day. It was a really sobering tale, and when I went home at night and tried to tell this story to my daughter, it was very difficult. This story is worth listening to.

I just want to thank Eva for spending the time and going through all this detail. I think telling the story takes a lot out of her, but we cannot forget that this happened so recently in our history, and we must do everything we can to make sure it never happens again. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Eva.

6:00 [London Real promo removed]

7:02 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Eva Schloss, the Holocaust survivor, educator and peace activist. In 1944 your family was captured by the Nazis and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where you and your mother survived until you were freed in 1945. You’re also the stepsister of Anne Frank, whose book The Diary of Anne Frank has been published in over 60 languages and tells the story of a 13-year-old girl hiding in Amsterdam from the Nazis. In 2012 you were awarded the MBE, and you have written three detailed books about your experiences. Eva, welcome to London Real.

Eva Schloss: Pleasure.

Brian Rose: It’s great having you here. We were just talking about London and how much it’s changed. When did you move to this city?

Eva Schloss: I moved for one year in 1952, from Amsterdam. I was going to be a photographer. Otto Frank was a house friend of my mother’s at the time. They were not married yet, they were just very friendly, and he helped me a lot, because I was very, very miserable. After school I didn’t really know what to do with my life, and I didn’t really care. Otto and my mother decided I should become a photographer, and I thought, OK, why not?

Otto gave me his Leica, because he used to take a lot of very nice pictures of his family and children. But he said, “I have no family any more, so I’m never going to take any more photos.” So he gave me this very good camera and said, “I hope you become a successful photographer.” And he found me a place in London where I became an apprentice, in Woburn Place. So I moved to London for a year.

Another friend I had known from Amsterdam, who had moved to London, found me a little lodging in Cricklewood. A Czech lady ran a little boarding house, and there were about six or seven people, and there was a young man from Israel who had studied economics. We became friends, and later he became my husband, and then we decided to stay here. But my intention was really just to come here for a year.

Brian Rose: It was probably good for you to get out of Europe and come to a new place.

Eva Schloss: That’s right, that’s what Otto said: it will do you good to see something different. But at that time I was actually quite shocked by London. First of all, in 1952 it was still full of bomb sites, really big holes, and very neglected. In Holland we were not well off, but we had a little apartment with central heating and double glazing. Here we had just open fires. There were other people, so we had to share a bathroom, we had to put a penny in to get hot water, and there was an outside toilet, which we had never, ever experienced, even in Austria, where I was born in Vienna in the 30s. We had all these facilities there.

We were always told that England was an advanced country, with all the innovations, modern and fashionable, and then when I came to London I was really shocked. And no food really, just buns and a cup of tea and a bit of salad. In 1952 there was still food rationing, which we didn’t have any more in Holland, and certainly not in Germany.

Brian Rose: So it was really a culture shock: very poor food, rationing, dirty. You talked about the smog, the fog, the bad air.

Eva Schloss: It was really amazing, and we thought this was an advanced, modern country.

Brian Rose: And Otto, who gave you the camera, was your stepfather?

Eva Schloss: Not at that time. I became very friendly with this Israeli boy, and after six months he said, “I’ve fallen in love with you. Let’s get married, and when I’ve finished my studies we can start a new life and go to Israel.” And I said, “No, thank you,” because I had a widowed mother in Amsterdam. You can imagine, we were very, very close, and I couldn’t imagine just deserting her.

Otto Frank came very often to London to keep an eye on me. He already realised I needed a bit of guidance. I told him this young man had asked me to marry him, but of course I wasn’t going to. He got a bit embarrassed and said, “Well, when you get settled, your mother and I have fallen in love as well, and we’d like to get married.” So I went back to this young man and said, “We can marry now,” which we did. We went to Amsterdam and got married there, and Otto and my mother got married a year later.

Brian Rose: Wow. And that’s how he became your stepfather. Otto Frank was the father of Anne Frank, and he survived the war.

Eva Schloss: He was the only one who survived of his family. His two girls and his wife died: his wife in Auschwitz and the two girls in Bergen-Belsen. Auschwitz, where I stayed, was liberated in January by the Russians, but Bergen-Belsen was liberated in April 1945 by the British, and she must have died a little before the liberation.

13:30 Brian Rose: I want to talk later about how Otto was with you after the war. I was wondering if we could start with where you were born.

Eva Schloss: In Vienna, in 1929, into a very wonderful family, with aunts and uncles and grandparents, and an older brother. My father had inherited a shoe factory from his father, and he was a very, very good businessman, so we were not rich, but we were comfortable. He was a daredevil, very sporty, and he was one of the first people in the 30s to buy a car. We made excursions into the mountains. I was sporty as well. My brother, we realised later on, was very artistic and more gentle, but I was really the tomboy in the family. So I always went with my father mountaineering and things like that. My mother and brother came with us, but she never went on daring things. She just waited somewhere in a cafe till we came down.

Brian Rose: Did you drive the car as well?

Eva Schloss: My father drove very well. Going up mountains on those bends, my mother would just start screaming. The roads were not so good at the time and it was actually quite dangerous, but my father loved all that, and so did I.

Brian Rose: And what was Vienna like in the 1930s?

Eva Schloss: I thought it was a lovely city, but when I went back for the first time in the 70s I was shocked, because it was very, very neglected. So it must already have been not that marvellous in the 30s. But I was very happy there. We lived in a suburb near Schönbrunn Palace, and when we were little we had a maid, and she always took us to this big park. On Sundays my grandfather took me to a sort of pub where he always went with his friends for a beer, and I always got a nice soup, which I loved. That was a very special treat for me. It was just lovely.

In the summer we went to Italy for a month, because that was what people did at that time, and then for a month into the mountains. I was very, very skinny. You wouldn’t believe it now. I hated food and didn’t eat much. I could have lived on spaghetti, but I had to eat all the vegetables, and fish with bones and things, so I was a really bad eater. I was sent to a sanatorium to put on weight, and I got cod liver oil on a spoon, which is horrible, and I was sick, so eventually they didn’t want me there. They said, “Pick up your daughter, she’s sick all the time.” I didn’t put on weight, but I was very healthy.

Brian Rose: And this is after World War One. What was the feeling like? Was the economy difficult, were people still trying to recover from the war?

Eva Schloss: Well, in the 30s, I must say I didn’t experience that, but it definitely was the case. Even in the 30s people were not so demanding. If you got a little bit of food, you were satisfied. You didn’t have all the luxuries kids have now. Like I say, we went on holiday and all that, but we had a seamstress mending our clothes. We didn’t go out and buy clothes all the time. Really, in a way, very simple.

Brian Rose: Simple contentment.

Eva Schloss: On a birthday I got some bananas from a friend, for instance, which I didn’t like anyway, but you didn’t get huge birthday presents or big treats. Kids didn’t have a watch. My brother got a watch for his 12th birthday, and that was fantastic, or a fountain pen. We were all very satisfied with little. And this is what we tried to instil in our daughters when they grew up, but it didn’t work, I’m afraid.

Brian Rose: At the time, did you know that you were Jewish? Were you with others?

Eva Schloss: You definitely knew that. We were not at all religious, but there were two things. You had to belong to a religious community. Austria was Catholic, there was practically nothing else, Catholics and Jews. Catholic people had to register with a church community, and Jewish people had to register with a synagogue community, and the birth certificate and all that came from the Jewish community.

Brian Rose: So every child had a religion at birth, from the parents.

Eva Schloss: Everyone had some religion they were associated with. You might not be religious, but you had to belong to something. And the tax was partly state tax, but partly the church or the synagogue taxed you as well. The other thing was that when you went to school you had to have religious education. It was one of the subjects. So the Jewish children were called out of their class and had Jewish education for an hour, two or three times a week, and afterwards we went back to our class, while the Catholic children had Christian education. So everybody knew who was a Jew.

Brian Rose: Did you feel different from the Catholics?

Eva Schloss: No, I didn’t feel different. I accepted that I was Jewish, and that was all right. Nobody said anything about it, and that was perfectly fine.

20:33 But that changed immediately in 1938, when Hitler’s Nazis just marched in. There was no fighting. They just marched in and took over, and our friends and the whole city became amazingly antisemitic from one day to the next. Just completely antisemitic.

Brian Rose: You said the Austrians were in some ways more antisemitic than the Germans.

Eva Schloss: Later on it turned out many of the Nazis, they all became Nazis, were commanders in camps and things like that.

Brian Rose: Do you remember the Nazis coming in?

Eva Schloss: I remember the flags, I remember the Hitler salute, and it was a great, great shock, because there was supposed to be a referendum on whether people wanted it or not, and it looked as if people didn’t want it. But Hitler really didn’t wait for that. He marched in before.

And there was something else I never realised, but heard recently. Jewish people were taken out of their homes and had to clean the pavements with little brushes. I always thought it peculiar: why should we clean the pavements? But it was because before the vote there were a lot of “No” slogans, no to occupation by the Germans, and they had to wash away the “No”. I had never realised what that was about.

Brian Rose: And how did the Jewish people feel about the Nazis at first?

Eva Schloss: In Vienna, in Austria, we already knew, maybe not the children, but the adults knew what had happened in Germany, because by 1938 there were already a lot of attacks, Jews losing their jobs, terrible things already. The Germans didn’t know that when Hitler came to power, and that’s why many people didn’t try to escape.

But Otto Frank always told us that when he saw the SS marching through the street singing that famous Nazi song, “When Jewish blood drips from our knives, then everything is going to get better,” he realised, this is not a country where I want to bring up my children. And they left already in 1933.

Brian Rose: So he was in Germany, and he realised earlier.

Eva Schloss: But a lot of people thought it couldn’t last. The Germans won’t choose a man like Hitler. And this is what adults and older kids always ask me about Hitler. He was an uneducated Austrian and not a politician. How did they follow a man like that? This is really unbelievable, because Germany was supposed to be the best-educated, most cultured country in Europe, and they followed somebody who was really a nobody.

That was because the Versailles Treaty was really, really unjust and bad for the Germans, and the Austrians of course. The Weimar Republic tried many, many things to improve things but never succeeded. There were many different governments trying to get work going again, and they had to pay a lot of money to the Allies, and there was really unbelievable poverty. I heard those stories from my mother and grandmother: there was no food, people were starving, there was no work, kids walked barefoot in the street in the winter. And it didn’t improve.

Then Hitler said, “I know how to make things better,” and people said, “Well, we’re not losing anything, let him try.” He was the one who said everybody would have a car, a Volkswagen, a car for the people, and he built the Autobahn. He was one of the first people in the world really to have this idea. Somehow he got money, and things improved.

Brian Rose: So he brought prosperity back, and their dignity.

Eva Schloss: That’s right. So of course even some Jewish people joined the Nazi party in the beginning. They said, “Yes, he will help us get our honour back again and be well off.” And then of course he started with his antisemitism to get more followers.

Antisemitism, we see it now again everywhere a little bit. I don’t compare it with the Nazi time, but it is there in people, there’s no doubt about it. Sometimes it is on the surface, sometimes it is really bad and open, and sometimes it is just there, and you only have to light it with a little bit of something and it flares up. That is what happened. Hitler blamed the Jews for losing the war, for all the poverty, for everything, and people went along.

Brian Rose: Is it because he needed a scapegoat?

Eva Schloss: He needed a scapegoat. Not everybody wanted to follow him, so he really needed more followers, and this is how he got them.

The other thing was that Russia had become communist, and when countries are so poor the communists become powerful. In Germany and Austria there was a big communist party, and there were street fights between the Nazis and the communists. And like now again, the world was more afraid of the communists than of the Nazis. This is really very, very important.

In England as well, the king who luckily didn’t remain king admired Hitler for putting Germany back on its feet, and so did the Church, and so did the whole middle class in England. Everybody was afraid of communism, not realising that the real danger was Hitler. The only one who saw who he was was Churchill. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie now about Churchill. He really had to fight, because the government wanted to make peace with Hitler. Churchill saw that he was a danger.

Brian Rose: Everyone was afraid of communism, because Russia was big, and they thought it was just a different way of running the economic system. But the real danger was Hitler.

Eva Schloss: Well, the rich people in England, who were always the powerful people at that time, didn’t want communism to spread to England, perhaps. The Vatican as well supported Hitler, and America certainly. McCarthy in the 50s was still afraid of communism, and even now. But if not for the Russians, I wouldn’t be sitting here, because the Second World War was basically fought in Russia until 1944. If Hitler had gone to England instead of Russia, God knows what would have happened. Russia really fought Hitler: the siege of St Petersburg, and Stalingrad and all that. That was amazing, amazing courage, and the Russians lost 30 million of their people. That was really amazing.

Brian Rose: So you thank the Russians for your liberation, for keeping you alive.

Eva Schloss: Definitely, definitely.

Brian Rose: And they don’t get enough credit sometimes.

Eva Schloss: No, not at all. Usually it’s the Americans. Sometimes when I tell my story in America, I always mention that we were liberated by the Russians, how we travelled with them and how they looked after us, and then they sometimes ask, “Which side were they actually on, our side or the German side?” They don’t know.

Brian Rose: They don’t know the history. Wow.

30:02 All right, so it’s 1938. You’re in Austria, the Nazis move in, and you know right away that this is going to get worse.

Eva Schloss: Well, not me, because I was a child, but the adults knew the danger. My father, as I say, was very energetic and had good ideas. He was really a very, very clever man. I’ve got his certificate from his college, which I never knew about: he passed six languages, and business studies, and all kinds of things. He was really sort of a genius. I admired him, but I had no idea he was that clever.

He had exported to Holland. In the south of Holland there was a big shoe industry, and he had business with them. They were not doing very well, so he went there to help them build up again. I don’t know exactly, but a couple of days after the Nazis had come in he went to Holland, on a business trip. That was still possible, because the occupation wasn’t organised yet. We still had the family there, the parents, the grandparents, and my father said he would see what happened and then try to get us out as well. But by the time he had an apartment and wanted us to come, things had changed. You had to have exit visas and entrance visas, passports and all that, and it was all very difficult. We lost our Austrian nationality and had to become Germans. Not just Jews, everybody. The Austrians, I suppose, were proud to belong to this up-and-coming country.

Brian Rose: And things happened little by little. I think that’s important for people to understand. I had a Stanford professor here named Philip Zimbardo, who did his experiment at Stanford, and he found that if you take away people’s personal rights little by little, that’s how they go to these great lengths. It happened slowly, right?

Eva Schloss: If you do it quickly, people might object. If you do it slowly, they accept it, and you think that as long as you do what they want, you’ll be safe. But of course it wasn’t so.

Brian Rose: How did your father get everyone from Austria to Holland?

Eva Schloss: We didn’t go to Holland, we went to Belgium, where you could get in somehow. But you couldn’t take anything with you. We lived in a little boarding house with two little rooms, one for my father and mother. My father lived in the south of Holland, so he came at weekends to visit us. My brother and I had another little room, and we had our meals together with all the other lodgers. It was very poor. I had to go to a French-speaking school, and of course I had no idea of French.

Brian Rose: What year is this?

Eva Schloss: 1939.

Brian Rose: So you’re ten years old.

Eva Schloss: I was put into a class, put at the back, and that was it. Nobody took any notice of me. I lost all my confidence and became shy. It was really very difficult. Then it was my birthday. I’d been there several months already, I could speak a little bit of French, I’d made a few friends, and I wanted a birthday party. In Austria I’d always had lovely birthday parties. The woman from the boarding house said I could invite five girls, so I gave them all an invitation. On the day of my birthday they all had a letter from their parents saying they were not allowed to come to my party.

Brian Rose: Why?

Eva Schloss: I went home crying. They didn’t give a reason, and my mother said, “Well, they just don’t want to mix with Jewish refugees.” You can imagine what that feels like for a child: you are nothing in other people’s eyes.

Brian Rose: Did anyone ever explain why?

Eva Schloss: No, not really. As refugees, as Jews, you were not welcome.

Brian Rose: And Europe is slowly becoming more dominated by the Nazi party.

Eva Schloss: Definitely. In the meantime Hitler had gone into Czechoslovakia and then into Poland, and then England and France declared war. That was in 1939. We were still in Brussels and my father was in the south of Holland, and he said that in the war the borders would be closed. He had been trying anyway to get a visa for us to come to Holland, and in February 1940, so during the war, we got a visiting visa to come to Amsterdam for three months.

My father rented a furnished apartment, because we had nothing, on the Merwedeplein, which was a modern development with little apartments, no gardens, and a big open square. Very nice: central heating, hot water, everything. So we moved there. A woman had had this apartment. Her son lived in Switzerland and she had gone to be with him, and she had sold her apartment very cheaply to a non-Jewish person who was going to let it. That’s how we got this apartment. So it was not our apartment; it was in a non-Jewish person’s name.

Brian Rose: And had the Nazis occupied Holland at this point?

Eva Schloss: No, not yet. We thought, this is it, that’s good. We were together as a family, we were settling down, and things would be good again.

37:00 We children went to the local school, and all the children came to this big square after school. That’s how a little girl came up to me one day and introduced herself, and it was Anne Frank, because the Frank family lived opposite.

Brian Rose: So that’s how you met Anne Frank. And she was about your age?

Eva Schloss: She was just one month younger than me.

Brian Rose: And what was she like?

Eva Schloss: I looked up to her, because she had not experienced antisemitism. She was only four when she came to Holland, so she learned the language quite quickly, and she was very sure of herself. Very domineering. She was interested in boys already. When I told her I had an older brother, she said, “Oh, when can I come to your apartment?” She always wanted a crowd around her. But we played together, skipping and hopscotch and marbles.

Then she took me to her apartment, and said her father would speak German with me, because at that time I didn’t speak Dutch. In Brussels by that time I spoke quite good French, actually. But Belgium is bilingual, with Flemish too, and that is similar to Dutch, so I was not completely lost. I did understand a bit. It was not quite the same language, but it was not as bad as when I was in Brussels.

Brian Rose: So that’s where you met Otto Frank, her father, and you spoke German with him. What do you remember about meeting him for the first time, given that he would later become your stepfather?

Eva Schloss: As I say, my father was very sporty, not even 40 at that time, I think, and Otto was in my view a bit elderly. My grandparents had emigrated to England by then, actually, and I missed them very much. So I thought of him as a sort of grandfather figure. He was very kind and gentle, but, as I say, not what I expected a father to be.

39:45 Brian Rose: And what happened over the next year or two?

Eva Schloss: Well, then in May the Germans invaded Holland. We still tried to escape to England on a boat, but it was too late, so we were caught there. Then of course Hitler went into Belgium and France, and Denmark and Norway. It was amazing how he had his army and could conquer the whole of Europe, which he did. In 1941 it really looked as if Hitler was going to win the war. It was really very, very scary.

In Holland the measures against Jewish people started to come very slowly, like you said, not to shock people, not to turn the Dutch population against them, which most of them were of course. Nevertheless there was a big Nazi party in all the occupied countries, but every country also had a big resistance movement, and those were the people who helped us find hiding places.

Brian Rose: How did they slowly make those demands and changes and persecutions on the Jewish people?

Eva Schloss: First of all, for instance, we were not allowed on public transport. We were not to go to cinemas or concerts. We children were not to go to swimming pools. We had non-Jewish friends, and they went to the cinemas and went swimming, and we couldn’t do that, so they tried to separate us from them. Then we were not allowed to go shopping in Christian shops, only in Jewish shops.

Brian Rose: They checked your ID?

Eva Schloss: You all had an ID, and then you had to wear a yellow star, so you were always recognisable. It was a nuisance, and we were upset of course. We had to hand in our radio, our bicycles. It made life difficult, but we were still together as a family. In the evenings my father taught us bridge, because there were four of us, and Monopoly had come out, so we played that. We were kind of isolated from the general population, but there were a lot of Jewish people around. You had to be in at eight o’clock. It was not too bad really.

But then, of course, people started to disappear. We had to go to Jewish schools, and they took people away from the school, and kids just disappeared. Only after the war did we hear that they were sent to Mauthausen in Austria, which was a terrible death camp. There were cliffs there, where people worked in the stone quarries, and they were just thrown down from the cliffs. We didn’t know that at the time, but nevertheless people disappeared.

Brian Rose: So groups of people start disappearing, families, adults, then children.

Eva Schloss: And then about 10,000 young people got a call-up notice in June 1942, to report with a list of what to bring, underwear and shoes and all this kind of thing, to work in factories in Germany. Very often the Dutch parents thought, well, they’re young, they’re strong, they probably really need people to work in their factories, and they sent their kids. But of course they were never, ever seen again. Again, they were sent to Mauthausen, as we heard later.

But the refugee parents, who had experienced Germany or Austria, knew they had deported people from Austria and Germany to the ghettos and the camps at that time. Why should they want Jewish people to work? So my father called us together and said, “Heinz, you’re not going. I’ve found people who will keep us safe.” And this is when we went into hiding. But we had to split up.

Brian Rose: Was that your father’s decision, to split up?

Eva Schloss: Well, no, it was not his choice. The apartments were very small, and nobody really offered accommodation for four people. They said, “We can take two of you, but not four.”

Brian Rose: Who are these resistance people? They’re not Jewish people?

Eva Schloss: No, no. There were people who hated being occupied by a foreign country. The Germans marched around in their uniforms, and people didn’t like the whole way of it, and the food rationing. The Germans took a lot of food away from Holland to feed their own people. So people were just against occupation, which is understandable. It was in every country, in France, and everywhere really. In Norway it was very big as well.

They printed ration cards, because they helped Jewish people. They shot particularly bad Nazis. They did all kinds of things. When the Allied planes flew over to bomb Germany and sometimes planes were shot down in Holland or France, the resistance sometimes helped the pilots and hid them. They also got radios from the Allies, which were dropped down, and weapons, and all kinds of things. So they did all kinds of things, but many were caught, of course, and executed as well.

Brian Rose: And so you go into hiding. What does that look like?

Eva Schloss: Well, as I said, I was a very active child, and suddenly I was with my mother in a little room and had to be quiet the whole day in case neighbours would hear that people were there. I didn’t know what to do. I was not a reader. I missed my friends, I missed my outdoor activities, I missed my father and brother. My mother tried to teach me so that I wouldn’t miss school, but I was not a good pupil, my mother lost her patience, I started to cry, and so it didn’t work.

Brian Rose: You’re 13 years old now?

Eva Schloss: Yes, 13 years old.

Brian Rose: How long did you think this would last?

Eva Schloss: Well, when we went into hiding, America was already in the war. My father said it couldn’t last long with powerful America; probably by Christmas it would be over. But of course America and England fought more in the Far East. Bombing was really the only thing; otherwise they didn’t really fight the Germans anywhere, not until 1944.

Brian Rose: 1944, and this is 1942.

Eva Schloss: This is 1942, yes.

47:35 Brian Rose: So you hide for two years?

Eva Schloss: For two years, till May 1944, when we were betrayed by a Dutch nurse who was a double agent. She really worked for the Nazis but pretended that she was a member of the resistance.

Brian Rose: And she contacted your father and was trying to help hide you?

Eva Schloss: Yes. It’s quite a complicated story, but my father had to change hiding place. We changed hiding places about six or seven times. We had just changed; my father and brother had come from the country to Amsterdam, and we visited them on the Sunday. On the Tuesday was my 15th birthday, and then the SS stormed in. What had happened, I learned later, was that when we visited, they followed us, because the place where my father was hiding through that nurse was a Nazi trap. In this house, 200 Jewish people were betrayed.

This nurse always had the place, because it was empty again after a few days. She always put people in the same place, and the Nazis always came and took them away.

Brian Rose: How do you spend two years in hiding? Doesn’t that make you go crazy?

Eva Schloss: Well, I thought it was the worst that could happen, but it was really nothing compared to what happened afterwards.

Brian Rose: How were you, as a young girl in her teens? Does the hiding change your personality?

Eva Schloss: I don’t think it changed my personality at that time, but I was bored. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I did a bit of drawing and a bit of writing, but what can you do when you have to sit still the whole day? My brother, on the other hand, was a musician, but of course he couldn’t make music. So he started to paint, and he created some amazing artwork. He also wrote over 200 poems, and he taught himself six languages. Some people had ideas of what to do and occupied themselves. But I didn’t like reading. I started to read a bit, but that was not what I really liked to do, and I just missed everything. I visited my brother and my father sometimes. It was really, really hard.

And what was worst, of course, was that the Germans made house searches, because they knew that of the 10,000 people called up, about half didn’t come. So where were they? They really wanted to catch every Jew, because they wanted to destroy the whole Jewish people. They knocked on doors in the night, it was always at night, and people had to open up and let them search their homes. So in all the places where we were, we had a hiding place within the hiding place: a false partition that made the room smaller, or a wardrobe with a false wall we could go behind, or sometimes even under the floorboards. So you can imagine we didn’t even dare to sleep, because the knock came and we had to go there quickly and cover the bed and all that.

51:31 Brian Rose: And at the same time, Anne Frank is hiding too, nearby.

Eva Schloss: Well, not quite nearby, but in Amsterdam. Of course, this was quite different, because there were eight people, and they were in Otto Frank’s building. Otto Frank’s office was quite big and only part of it was used, so they made part of it into what is called the Secret Annex.

Brian Rose: A different experience there. They were together as a family.

Eva Schloss: A different experience, but the same fate, because they were betrayed in August, a few months after us, and in September they were deported to Auschwitz.

Brian Rose: And so she’s writing in her diary probably similar thoughts to yours, as a young girl: what’s going on, why these kinds of things? Why do you think that book became so popular and powerful?

Eva Schloss: Well, first of all, it was the first book published after the war about this situation. And then Otto was a very, very good promoter. He and my mother spent their whole life really talking about the diary, meeting people from all different countries. They made their own contracts with everybody and saw that the translations were being done. I’ve written three books, and I realise you need to promote something, because there are so many books appearing. If it’s not known, who will buy it? But if you publicise that it’s important, then people will.

It had been published already in German and in French, and in Dutch of course, but it wasn’t popular until it was published in New York in 1952. Nobody really wanted to publish it; it was a big job to find a publisher. But then a Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, wrote a front-page article in the New York Times about the importance of this book, and that really brought it to people’s attention and made it a bestseller.

Brian Rose: Because nobody wanted to talk about this stuff in the 1950s.

Eva Schloss: Well, by the 1950s people started to want to know a little bit. In 1945, when I came back, I was desperate to tell people what I had suffered, what it was, but people didn’t want to know. So we suppressed it. By 1952 people started wanting to know what really happened, and there was the diary. Of course, she didn’t write anything about the camps, but she tells a little bit about hiding and things like that. It’s not really a Holocaust book.

But that was as far as people wanted to know. They didn’t really want to know about the camps yet. That came much later. Even when Elie Wiesel published his book, it wasn’t a bestseller at first.

Brian Rose: Too early.

Eva Schloss: Yes, it was still too early.

Brian Rose: Even 25 or 30 years later.

Eva Schloss: It takes time. When I came back, people said, “We have learned our lesson. Never again Auschwitz; nothing like that will happen again.” But it wasn’t so. In the 1950s and 1960s it was actually a sort of happy time: we had survived, the war was over, and we were going to make a better world. But we didn’t make a better world. We had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the terrible things in Cambodia, and people started to question what was going on. People realised we have to learn from history.

56:13 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about your 15th birthday. You’ve been betrayed by the double agent. What happens that day?

Eva Schloss: We didn’t realise. I couldn’t understand how they knew; that was a puzzle. But they took us away, of course, to the Gestapo headquarters for interrogation. You might still see it in films: a little room, a bare table with the Nazis behind it, a chair in front, a big picture of Hitler on the wall. They just threw me on this chair and started to ask me questions. Where have you been these two years? Who helped you? Where did you get your ration cards?

I was in shock. I couldn’t think, which was lucky, because they wanted to know who had helped us, and I would have known things, but I didn’t speak. I thought, well, now I’m going to be killed. I was 15 years old; you can imagine how you feel. They were really rough. They beat me, and then they threatened they would kill my brother if I didn’t talk. That shocked me even more, because I realised they had been caught as well, and I couldn’t understand what on earth had happened. They were not in the same place; how could they get them?

Eventually they let me go, and I was shown into a little room, and there were my father, my brother and my mother. My father explained that the Nazis had come into the house with their own key and talked with the hosts as if they were friends, so he realised that they had been betrayed. And of course they had followed us and knew where we were.

Brian Rose: So you’re thrown in that cell. What happens next?

Eva Schloss: Then we spent the night in a prison, in a huge room with hundreds of people, no toilets, just buckets. Awful. Shock, shock. You couldn’t really understand. And the next day we were taken by ordinary train, but with lots of guards, to Westerbork, which was a holding camp.

Brian Rose: How were your father and mother now? Was your father trying to be strong?

Eva Schloss: Well, they were all actually quite in shock. I wouldn’t say he was strong. I could see he was looking for any escape on the train, but you couldn’t talk because there were guards all over, and there was no way of escaping.

But there is a very interesting thing which I only found out last year. I was in Westerbork to give a talk, and I told people I don’t really remember anything of Westerbork, because we were there only two days. That is what I wrote in my book and what I remember: we were taken there on a Wednesday, and on the Friday morning we were already called out to be transported to the east. And the director of Westerbork said, “No, that’s not true. You were transported away a week later, on a Friday.” On the Friday I mentioned there was no transport. So it shows you that I was still in shock, and that this whole episode has gone completely out of my head.

Brian Rose: Do you ever wonder about your memories?

Eva Schloss: Well, when I wrote my first book, Eva’s Story, I knew everything exactly, because I hadn’t spoken for 40 years and I had it all engraved in my head. I saw everything in front of me. But obviously this week, more than a week, from the Wednesday till the Friday of the following week, is blank in my head. I really don’t know anything about Westerbork.

1:01:04 Brian Rose: So you’re there for nine days and then they transport you east. Do you know what’s going to happen?

Eva Schloss: Well, by that time my father had already made contact with people. I had just the clothes I had on. My father had got some clothes from people, knowing that we were going to be transported, some underwear, and my mother took a hat and coat.

Westerbork was run by Jews under the supervision of a Nazi commander. The Nazi commander would tell the Jewish people on the Friday, “We need a list of 800 people to be transported.” Can you imagine, this man had to decide who they were going to send to their death. If people had been there a long time and had made contacts and knew the people, they were not put on the list. But we were relatively new, so we were put on the list immediately. And they had also caught 500 Gypsies, because they didn’t kill only Jews. So we were added to a transport of Gypsies, really. There were about 500 Gypsies and about 300 or 400 Jews on this particular transport.

Brian Rose: And what’s the train like?

Eva Schloss: They call it a cattle truck. It was like a goods wagon, a container really: huge, metal, with a little opening with barbed wire across, heavy iron doors locked from the outside, and just floorboards. Nothing.

Brian Rose: Did you know where you were going?

Eva Schloss: No, of course they never told you anything. But Holland is the most western country, so eastwards is bad news.

That was the last time we were together as a family. My father gave us ideas. He said he couldn’t protect us any more, so we would have to be on our own. He said, try to be clean, always wash yourself, help each other, all kinds of tips, which later I had to laugh at, because there was no possibility of doing anything like what he recommended.

And my brother told me that they had had to escape from the woman where they were hiding before, because she was blackmailing them, and that is how they came into the hands of this nurse. Before they escaped from that house, they hid the paintings under the floorboards with a note: “This belongs to Heinz and Erich Geiringer, and after the war we are going to pick it up again.”

Brian Rose: So he told you about his paintings under the floorboards, and you remembered that?

Eva Schloss: Yes. Well, later, of course.

And so we had a terrible, terrible journey.

Brian Rose: How long?

Eva Schloss: Three or four days. We didn’t even know; sometimes we slept, so we didn’t know how many days. Once a day the doors were thrown open. They changed the buckets, we got some clean water and a new bucket for the toilet, and they threw in big chunks of bread. That was all we got, which of course was not enough for everybody. People were crying, people fainted. There was no air, and with the metal it was boiling hot.

Eventually the train stopped, and we heard shouting, and dogs, lots of Alsatian dogs; they were in all those camps. Eventually they opened the door. It was a lovely May day, and we saw a lot of people in those striped uniforms.

Brian Rose: Which uniforms?

Eva Schloss: Camp uniforms: grey with blue stripes, jackets, trousers and caps. And a lot of SS people, some in green, some in black, some in brown uniforms, lots of them milling around, and lots and lots of people.

Brian Rose: What were the SS like?

Eva Schloss: Well, we just heard shouting, “Raus, raus!” So we jumped down, and we saw we were on a platform, and it was Auschwitz.

Now, we knew about Auschwitz, because the BBC broadcast to all the occupied countries in their own languages. The Dutch broadcast was at nine o’clock, and it always started with “da da da dum”: this is the BBC from London. In all the hiding places where we were, people wanted to know how the war was going. Dutch people were not allowed to listen to foreign radio, only German or Dutch, but the BBC told how the war was going: the war in Africa, the Russians advancing. So we had a bit of hope while we were in hiding that it must finish soon. But they also told about the 300 camps in Germany and Poland, of which Auschwitz was the biggest, where Jewish people were systematically gassed. So at that moment we really didn’t have much hope of staying alive. You can imagine how that feels.

Brian Rose: So on the train you’re thinking you might be going to one of these camps.

Eva Schloss: Well, there were also work camps. You always try thinking of the best thing. My father said, well, perhaps we’ll go and work somewhere. He didn’t say we might be killed; he gave us tips on how to stay alive. You knew it was at the back of your mind, but you don’t talk about it, especially not to children.

But once we saw Auschwitz, we really thought that’s it. And the next command was: men and women to different sides. As you can imagine, that was a terrible scene: mothers saying goodbye to their sons, fathers to their daughters, wives and husbands embracing. My father, who was not religious, took me by the hands and said, “God will protect you.” I remember this because he spoke about God, which he had not really done before. Out of desperation: he couldn’t look after us, but God would look after me.

So the men walked away.

Brian Rose: Can you see all of this in your eyes?

Eva Schloss: Yes, I see it all in front of me, as if it was yesterday. Those are images in my head that will never go away. And my brother was really very, very scared. You could see he was trembling; he was very white. Terrible.

Brian Rose: How were you?

Eva Schloss: My mother gave me her hat and coat. I didn’t want to wear it; it was hot and it was ridiculous. But she said, “Perhaps it comes in handy.” You weren’t thinking you were going to be killed. You had it in your mind, but you pretended.

1:10:24 Then we heard the whisper: “Mengele, Mengele, Dr Mengele.” You’ve probably heard of him. He was a camp doctor, a proper medical doctor, probably in his late thirties, who decided who was going to die and who was going to live, because the first selection was taking place. We had to stand in rows of five, a big queue, and he looked you over for just a fraction of a second and said, “This side or this side.” Life or death. But of course we didn’t know. He looked at me for just a fraction of a second, and the hat had a big brim, so he didn’t see how young I was. That definitely saved me.

Brian Rose: And it was Mengele making the decision on who lived or died, based on their age or physical fitness?

Eva Schloss: Well, on how you looked. There were people perhaps of 50 who looked ashen and tired from the journey, or were sick, and they went to the wrong side. And there were older people who were taken in with us. He didn’t ask the age; it depended on how you looked. Otto Frank was already in his fifties, and he was not selected, because he was a very solid, tall man, he had been an officer in the First World War, and even when he was 90 he stood completely straight. So he made a good, strong impression. They were looking for strong people to work.

Most of the work was really useless, but at that time a transport came practically every day, and the crematoria and the gas chambers just couldn’t cope with so many people. So about half of each transport was selected away and the other half was taken into the camp.

Brian Rose: So it was a capacity issue. They weren’t really trying to find workers.

Eva Schloss: Well, a lot of the work was useless, but they just didn’t have the time or the chance yet to gas everybody.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a huge complex of many different camps. There was Birkenau, the women’s camp; Auschwitz; Monowitz, which was a work camp; and a camp for special cases, because they tried to exchange Jewish people for tanks or weapons. I didn’t know it at the time, but there were negotiations going on with the Allies about all kinds of things, so they always kept some Jewish people for exchange. There was even an orchestra in the men’s camp, which I didn’t know about. It was huge.

1:14:04 Brian Rose: How did that day finish, when they separated you?

Eva Schloss: Well, we were selected, and one part of our transport went one way, and we entered the camp, into a huge barrack. The next command was: undress completely. Naked, with the SS pointing their guns at us. In our embarrassment we tried to hide, but of course they just laughed. All our clothes were taken away, including the hat and coat which had saved me. Then everybody was shaved, and tattooed with a number. They told us, “If ever we want you, you’re going to be called by a number. Forget you’re a human being. You’re just like an animal.” And everything was written in books: your age, your name, your nationality, which transport you came on, because people came from all over Europe, what job you could do. It was all taken down very, very accurately.

And while this was going on, the Nazis told us with much pleasure what had happened to the people who went to the other side. They said they had been taken to a shower. They were even given soap and a towel, and they waited there. But of course it wasn’t a shower; gas came out, and within 10 or 15 minutes all your family fell to the floor and were dead. “And if you go out later, you will already smell the burning.” Can you imagine how a mother felt who had just been separated from her child? People started to cry and to scream. It was awful.

Then we were told, “Now you’ll go into the shower.” Well, we thought that would happen to us, of course, so we didn’t want to go. We just stood there, but they called more guards and we were pushed in, and it was a shower. Then we came out, still naked, and there were two huge heaps of clothes. We were thrown one garment, which of course never fitted. It could have been a winter coat or a dressing gown or whatever. Then we were thrown two shoes, and that was all we ever had. We never had anything else.

Everything was always quick, quick; we had to run. We were taken into a barrack, a very low wooden structure with a sort of chimney in the middle and, on both sides, bunks three high, with just boards, nothing in them at all. About six or seven people had to go in each compartment, and they told us, “That is where you will spend the time you are still alive.”

Brian Rose: How are you feeling at this point?

Eva Schloss: Sick. We were starving, we were thirsty.

Brian Rose: Is your mother still with you?

Eva Schloss: My mother was with me.

Brian Rose: But you don’t know where your brother and father are.

Eva Schloss: No. We had no idea where they were going. We didn’t know about all those different camps. They were just taken away.

Then, laughably, this block where we were had a sort of forecourt separated by fences, and they told us we would be in quarantine for three weeks, because we might have brought illnesses into the camp. Even at the time we thought it was ridiculous, and looking back now, the camp was riddled with illnesses, typhus, cholera, dysentery, all catching things, and we were still relatively healthy. But on the way to the barrack I was very thirsty. We hadn’t had anything to drink for ages, and we passed a water tap and I drank. Within a couple of days I had diarrhoea.

But you were only taken to the toilets three times a day. There were no toilets in our barracks. Each camp, A, B, C, D, all of women’s Birkenau, was long, with barracks on both sides, all the same, and in the middle what was called the Lagerstrasse, the camp road. At the end there were about ten barracks on each side, and then one barrack which was the toilets and another which was the washing facilities. The toilets were long cement blocks with big holes in them, and you had to sit down on this cement, with holes on both sides and the guard walking in the middle. It was filthy, of course, with diarrhoea sticking to it, and you had to sit on it. If you didn’t, you were beaten. In the washroom there were a few taps where water was dribbling, so washing you could forget about.

In quarantine we were taken there three times a day: early in the morning, perhaps five o’clock when it was just getting light, then at lunchtime, and then in the evening. But because of the water I had diarrhoea. So what do you do? I hid somewhere in a corner outside the barrack and did what I had to do.

The SS didn’t really run the camp. That was done by the kapos, usually Polish criminals who had been arrested and taken to the camp and given very special jobs. They even got parcels from home. They were superior to us and very, very cruel, worse than the Nazis, because the SS did not really have much to do with us. They gave orders to the kapos, they inspected and walked around, but the contact we really had was with the kapos. It was all very organised.

Anyway, I got caught and was beaten up. I was told, “You filthy Jew, look what you’re doing, you make us dirty,” when the camp was filthy everywhere anyway. As punishment I had to kneel down for an hour holding a heavy stool up above me, and all the people in the barrack, all the Dutch friends, had to stand around and watch, including my mother. That was horrible, I can tell you. It was really heavy; I could hardly lift it, and I had to hold it for an hour. My mother stood there crying, seeing her little girl going through this.

1:22:56 Brian Rose: How do you keep any kind of hope in these situations?

Eva Schloss: Well, I get asked this very often, and I say, well, I was 15 years old. I had experienced a really lovely life, and I really wasn’t ready to die. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to experience life. So I never gave up. I was born in May anyway, a Taurus, very stubborn. My children resented that I’m so stubborn. But I was stubborn, and I was not going to give up.

And this was just the beginning. When we came out of quarantine after the three weeks, we were taken to a different barrack. In the morning, when it was still dark and very early, we had roll call. Of course, we didn’t know what time it was or what day of the week it was; we lost track. Every day was the same. You had to stand in front of your barrack in rows of five, and the whole camp was counted, and that took two hours every morning. In the evening, when you came back from work, you had to stand for another two hours. In the morning, after the camp was counted, you got a mug of liquid. That was all you got. Then you were taken to different work.

While we were standing at roll call, which was called Appell, after the quarantine the SS came and picked out people for different kinds of jobs. I must have been one of the youngest, because there were no children with us, and I was quite nice-looking. With my shaved hair, not so nice, but better than most people, let’s say. So he picked me, the SS man with a kapo, and said, “Kanada.” I didn’t know what it meant, but I thought it was something special, and I started to panic in case I would be separated from my mother.

So I said in German, “Can my mother come too?” And the kapo’s mouth flew open. How dare a prisoner talk to an SS man? But I think the SS man was also kind of shocked that somebody talked to him. My mother was standing next to me, so he looked at her. She was 40, and she was a beautiful woman. So he said to the kapo, “Yes, she can go too.” So she could go with me, and we were taken to a different barrack and went to this Kanada, which I had no idea about.

What was happening at that time, June 1944, was that the Hungarian Jews were being picked up, because until then they had not been taken to the camps. Every day hundreds of women came to Birkenau, and for most of them there was not even a selection. Most went straight to the gas chambers. Some did come into the camp, so some did survive, but not many.

Brian Rose: Why did most of them go?

Eva Schloss: Well, I think there were no other transports coming at that time, probably, so they just killed as many of them as possible. As I say, they always had to know how many they could manage to do in one day. I don’t know exactly why it was all like this.

Kanada was the place where all the things people brought along were taken, even the clothes we had on. It was a nickname: Kanada, the good life. And it was better, because the work wasn’t so hard. We had to sort out all the belongings that people had brought, and one of the things I had to do was open the hems of all the garments, because a lot of people had sewn in money or jewellery or gold, and we had to find all this and hand it over to the SS. That was one of the privileges: you also found food. At that time you didn’t really starve; you had enough to eat. There was even a lunch break, when you could sit down and eat whatever you found. We did this for about three weeks, till the transports from Hungary stopped.

And one day there was another miracle. I call the hat my first miracle. I was sitting on the ground outside, against the barrack, and there was barbed wire across, and I saw people in striped uniforms. We didn’t have striped uniforms; we had those rags. They were walking and doing work, with the SS there. And suddenly I saw a man walking there, also in the striped uniform, and his posture looked familiar. It was my father.

Unbelievable, because it was a women’s camp area, with hundreds of thousands of people, and he should just walk there, doing a job. When the SS man was not looking, I called softly. He heard me and came walking along the fence, and I asked about Heinz. “Heinz is all right, and Mutti is all right?” So we could say a few words. He knew this was Kanada. They had obviously not been in quarantine, so he had already been working for three weeks. He said he worked in a timber yard, and he said, “Can you get me cigarettes?” I said, “But you don’t smoke.” He had never smoked. He said, “But I can bargain with them for more food.” I could find cigarettes, because you found everything; people had brought everything to the camp. So the next lunchtime I went there again with some cigarettes, and when the guard wasn’t looking, I was able to throw them over. I saw him for three days, and then he was never there any more.

But this was definitely a miracle. I knew that he was all right, and I knew that Heinz was still all right. We worked there for a few weeks, and then that was finished and we had to go back to normal work.

1:31:28 That was hard labour, usually outdoors. There wasn’t really enough work; as I said, they didn’t need those thousands of people. So we had to carry big boulders from one place to another, and then we got a little hammer and had to hack them into little pieces and carry them somewhere else. I think it was useless work, just to keep us occupied.

People got illnesses, cholera, typhus, all kinds of illnesses, and died. People were taken to different work and different barracks, so we lost track of people. Selections were taking place. We were full of lice, in our hair and body lice, so we were itching with dirty fingernails, opening wounds that became infected. Everything was really bad.

I got a typhus attack, and my mother said she had to take me to the hospital barrack where Mengele worked. People said, “You mustn’t go there; you don’t come out alive.” But my mother said, “If I don’t take her, she’ll die anyway.” In desperation, as in normal life, you take somebody to the hospital. So she took me. It was also a low barrack, and somebody came out in a nurse’s uniform, and my mother stopped where she was walking and looked at this woman, and this woman looked as well. It was a cousin of my mother’s, Minni, who had been transported from Theresienstadt.

They had lived in Prague. Austria used to be one big empire, so the family used to live in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Vienna, and partly in Poland as well, in what used to be Galicia. She had been transported from Prague with her mother to Auschwitz. Her husband was a skin specialist who worked in the Auschwitz men’s camp and had to treat the Nazis as well, so he knew Mengele, and he had asked Mengele if his wife could work as a nurse. She wasn’t really a nurse, but they pretended she was. He found her through her number, because everything was registered and they could find anybody. So she was working with Mengele there, which was not a wonderful job, but at least she was better off. She got more food, and she even had her hair. She gave us some medication, and that saved my life.

Brian Rose: Wow.

Eva Schloss: The next miracle. That is three miracles now, that we ran into her, when there were so many parts of the camp. It’s just unbelievable, really unbelievable.

1:35:24 Then, as I said, we worked and worked and worked. My mother, like any mother would, gave me some of her bread rations, and she had become really very thin. She was quite tall.

Brian Rose: How are you holding up now, after months of living in the camp? I know you’re sick with typhus, but how are you emotionally?

Eva Schloss: Still holding on. My mother too. We were together, which was very important. Sometimes we woke up and the people next to us had died in their sleep. You had to report it, and they had to be taken away. It happened all the time.

You couldn’t commit suicide; you had nothing to do it with. The only way you could do it was to throw yourself against the electrified barbed wire, which I saw a few times. It’s a very strong current, so the person burst into flames, you heard a terrible scream, and they just burned to death. There were some people who did that because they just couldn’t stand life any more. Or when you went to work, you usually had to run, always in rows of five, and if somebody went a bit out of line, a dog was let loose and tore the person apart, or they were taken back to camp, where a gallows was erected on the big square in the middle, and we all had to watch this person being hanged. You watch, but you close your eyes; you don’t look. Still, you can imagine how that was.

Then one time we were going to a shower, and we came out naked, and there was Mengele with some of his SS people. You had to parade naked in front of him and turn around, and then he sent you to this side or to the other side. I went through, and my mother followed. She had become very thin and didn’t look too good any more. He looked at her, she turned around, and then she went to the wrong side, with about 40 of our women from the Dutch group. I still ran to her before she went, and one of the kapos beat me over the back with a big stick and separated us. So I was not even allowed to say goodbye to her. Those women walked out naked, and that was it.

Brian Rose: Separated from you.

Eva Schloss: Yes. We didn’t know what had happened.

Brian Rose: You thought she was going to be killed.

Eva Schloss: Well, yes.

Brian Rose: And Mengele at the time, did he have a reputation for experimenting?

Eva Schloss: Yes, in his hospital he experimented on women. He operated, taking out a kidney, for instance, without anaesthetic, or he gave them injections of different things to see how long they could live with it, all kinds of tests. And he was interested in twins. If twins came, both had to be there, babies, toddlers or older ones, and they were taken away and put into his hospital, and he made experiments on them. Some did survive, but some of course didn’t, because of the experiments, or if one died, the other one was of no use to him, and then they were killed as well.

Anyway, we were going to move that night to a different part of the camp. The A, B, C and D camps were all separated with electrified barbed wire. But that night, I don’t know any more how I did it, but I did it: I went through a gate that was open at night, but with a guard and a light shining on the entrance, to where the special staff lived, where Minni was living. I went there in the night to tell her what had happened to my mother. When the searchlight was turning, I just slipped through. Again, very amazing that I was able to do that, but I was so desperate. I really risked my life; I could have been shot going through there. But nothing happened to me. I woke Minni, because I knew where she was sleeping, and told her, and then I quickly ran back and went with my group to a different part of the camp. And that was it. I didn’t hear any more of my mother or of Minni.

1:41:17 And so it became winter. I had a job sitting in a barrack called the Weberei, which means weaving. There was a huge trestle table in the middle where they threw all kinds of material, and you had to tear it into little strips about an inch and a half or two inches wide and plait them into plaits, which had to be very strong. You had to make 200 metres of it, and it was measured in the evening, and they pulled it to see if it came apart. They weren’t long pieces; sometimes it was rubbery material. You had no scissors; you had to tear it with your teeth. A terribly hard job. Your hands were frozen, your feet were frozen, you were on the mud floor with bare feet. Sometimes you lost your shoes in the snow, and the snow was this high.

And I nearly gave up. I thought, I’m all on my own. I don’t know if my father or my brother exist. My mother is dead. I just can’t stand it any longer. Many, many people had been taken away; we didn’t know what had happened. There were not so many of us any more, and very few Dutch people. We were mixed with Polish people, and all kinds of languages were going on. I had no support. It was really awful. I had frostbite and open toes, which started to become infected.

I was working, thinking I can’t carry on, and a kapo came in and said to me, “You’re wanted outside.” I thought, oh, what now? I went outside, and there was my father, standing with an SS man. I couldn’t believe it. He looked very, very bad, very thin. But of course a big smile came on his face, and we fell into each other’s arms, speechless. I asked about Heinz. He said Heinz was OK; he worked in a garden, planting vegetables. And he asked, “Where is Mutti?” I burst into tears and said, “She has been gassed. She was selected.” This man crumpled in front of my eyes. He just took me and cried, and we both cried. It was horrible. The SS man just stood there. Then he took my father away again.

Brian Rose: He thought your mother was dead.

Eva Schloss: Yes. He came for three days to see me. The next time, he told me he had been to the kitchen in our camp and told the kitchen maid that a girl called Evi, because Evi was my nickname, would come, and that she should give me some extra food. He told me how she looked, and the next day I went and found her in the kitchen. She said, “Oh, your father is an amazing person.” Even with how he looked, he had this charm. He had just said, “My daughter is starving and has lost her mother. Can you help?” So she gave me some extra food. Three times he came in all, and I could get food a few times, but then I couldn’t any more.

But that gave me hope again. He was alive, Heinz was alive, and the war would be finished soon. “Hold on, hold on,” he said to me.

Brian Rose: Another miracle.

Eva Schloss: Yes, definitely another miracle.

1:46:18 By that time, as I told you, the Dutch people and other people had disappeared, because the Germans knew, perhaps at the beginning of January, that the Russians were approaching, so they started to empty the camp. Every day they took thousands of people out of the barracks and marched them into Germany and Austria. The barracks were getting empty, and lots of the SS guards had disappeared too, so some of the gates between the different camps were left open.

One day two or three Dutch women I knew from our transport came from a different part of the camp and told me they had seen my mother. I didn’t believe it. I thought they just wanted to cheer me up. But they said, “Yes, yes, and this cousin of yours is in the hospital barrack, and she is hiding your mother.” And I thought, if they know about the cousin, there must be some truth in it. So I started to believe it, and they said, “Try to go there.” As I say, it had become easier to move around; you could say you had something bad and had to go to the hospital barrack. It took me a few days to manage it, but I was taken there, and I went into this barrack, and Minni was walking around, because she was in charge of it. She really was there, and she really took me to my mother, whom she had hidden in a bunk far out of sight, because she was very, very poorly and very thin.

You can imagine, to see each other. At that time, after a shower we always got a different garment, and I had a heavy winter coat on, with nothing underneath. My mother thought I looked quite well in this big, heavy coat, but she opened it, wanting to see me, and I was nearly a skeleton. And she too looked terrible. Minni said, “I can’t keep you here now; you have to go back. But come again, and when you come, I will hide you as well.” There were few guards by then, and they were not so bothered about keeping check. That was never possible before, but by that time you could do all kinds of things.

So that is what I did. I got there again, and Minni hid me in the bunk with my mother, under one terrible blanket. They were single bunks in this hospital barrack, three high, and she was right at the top, so I had to climb up there. She could hardly come down.

Then the Germans started to call out, “Everybody out, we’re going to march away from here.” And we heard that they said when they left, when the Russians were coming, they were going to lock up the barracks and burn the whole camp down. Nobody wanted to be burnt alive, as you can imagine. So I said to my mother, “We’ll have to go; we just have to try.” We didn’t know they were marching; we thought perhaps they were going on trains. We didn’t really think about what would happen.

One night they called out, “Out of the barrack, we’re going to march.” But then the Russians flew over and there was an air raid, so it was back into the barrack, we’ll march later. That night they called out two or three times, “Come, march,” and we had to go back again. My mother was so weak, and I was weak, and I said, “Look, they won’t walk anyway. Let’s just stay.” So we fell asleep; we were exhausted. And we woke up in the morning and there was no shouting, no dogs barking. The Germans had fled, taking most of the inmates with them.

Brian Rose: And you and your mum were in the bunk.

Eva Schloss: Yes. Again, a miracle that we didn’t go. Minni had gone as well; she disappeared. In this whole area there were perhaps 300 women left, and the rest was completely deserted. But don’t forget, it was January 1945, one of the coldest winters on record. The snow was this high. There was no water, there was nothing, and a lot of the people in the hospital barrack were so weak they couldn’t even get out. So people started to die.

There was a Polish woman and me, who were still sort of the strongest, and they said we had to take the bodies outside. You couldn’t bury them, because we had no tools and there was the snow, but we had to put them outside. So I had to carry out women who had spoken the day before, with their eyes still open, and we made big heaps outside the barrack. I think that was the worst thing I had to do. I was still 15.

We were on our own for about ten days. We did find food, bread and things like that, because of what was hoarded in those barracks, all the clothes and everything that was always going to Germany. I read recently that the Germans could never have carried on the war for so long if they hadn’t looted: from six million Jews, but also from Gypsies, from gay people, from many others. They took a lot of things away and gave them to the German population who had been bombed. The jewellery and the gold: they looted an enormous amount of goods and money. And apartments like Otto Frank’s: after they went into hiding, a Dutch removal firm went in and emptied it. Apartments were rented, you didn’t own them, so the Jewish apartments were let again to other people, but the furniture and everything in them was taken to Germany to supply people who had been bombed. So you can imagine there was a lot that helped them.

1:54:19 One day I was looking around. There was a pond outside, which we had to hack at to get some water, and we walked around to see if we could find something. At the exit the gate was open. Some Polish people had gone home, if they lived near or had friends there, but other Polish people had stayed if they had far to go. And there was this huge creature with icicles and fur, and from a distance I thought it was a bear. But it wasn’t. It was a Russian soldier.

We went to him, and he didn’t know what this place was, so we took him to a barrack and showed him. The Polish women could talk with him, and they explained to him that it was a death camp. He had no idea. He said he was a scout; he had to find out whether the army could just come in or would have to fight. He couldn’t do anything himself; he had to go back, but the army would come and look after us. And indeed a few days later they came, with horses and a field kitchen and guns and tanks. They stayed the night and fed their own people, and they fed us very greasy cabbage soup with pieces of bacon in it. The smell was just so wonderful, you can’t imagine. They gave us big metal bowls, and we just slurped it and ate and ate and ate. But I’ve never had such a painful night on a bucket, because the food ran right through me. In the morning lots of people had died from overeating, because the body just didn’t have the strength to digest anything. So from then on we had to be very, very careful. Then they left again.

Eventually I said to a French girl, “Let’s go to the men’s camp and see if we can find our families.” That was dangerous, because fighting was going on all around us and bullets flew over our heads. But we went, and we found it eventually. The Russians had made a bit of a headquarters there, because Auschwitz, have you ever been there?

Brian Rose: I’ve been to Dachau, but not Auschwitz.

Eva Schloss: There were proper solid brick buildings, three storeys high, and there were even washing facilities and toilets in those barracks for the men. It was much, much better than for the women. So the Russians had made a camp there, and I asked if I could look around, and I went into many of those buildings. I found two people who looked familiar, and I went to one and said, “I think I know you.” It was Otto Frank.

The first question he asked me was, “Have you seen my family, my girls or my wife?” I hadn’t seen them. But he had seen my father and brother, and he said they had gone with the Germans when they fled. I didn’t know that was a bad thing. I thought, well, that’s it, the war will soon finish and they’ll be OK.

Then I went back to fetch my mother, and she came to Auschwitz as well, because Birkenau was nothing really, but there we had supervision and were sort of protected. But there was very fierce fighting in Poland, because the Germans didn’t want the Russians to get into Germany, so they really held out there. They even came back to Birkenau, which is another story, to get more people out. At that time we felt safe, but the Russians decided, “We won’t leave you here, because the Germans could take the camp again, and then it wouldn’t be safe for you.”

Brian Rose: What did the Russians think of the camps and what had happened there?

Eva Schloss: They didn’t really know anything. We couldn’t really speak with them.

1:59:13 Eventually they said, “We are going to take you away from here, eastwards, because the war isn’t finished, and we are going to keep you safe.” That might have been the middle of February. So we travelled with the help of the Russians until May. The troops were going one way and we were going the opposite way, so very often we were put on a siding and had to wait, sometimes a few days. Sometimes we were taken into a little village and stayed on the floor. Everything was still very basic, but they saw that we had enough food, and they gave us Russian uniforms, so that we had something decent to wear: very solid and thick, women’s skirts and blouses with buttons with the symbol of communism.

Brian Rose: And you’re feeling stronger now, eating?

Eva Schloss: Yes, we had food. Some people still died, but we were getting better. We travelled through Poland, through Romania, through Russia, and we saw unbelievable devastation. The Germans had burned down every town, every village, every field, and people came out of the ground; we didn’t know where people were living. It was terrible. Everything was in ruins.

Eventually we ended up in Odessa, which had also been occupied, and we were put in a sort of little palace, but it was empty, with nothing in it, so we still slept on the floor. It was not far from the beach. They said, “You are not allowed to go into town. Stay in your house, because you will not find your way back.” But my mother and I were very nosy, and we already felt quite well, and we said, “We’ll never have another opportunity to come to Odessa. We’re going into town.” So we took a tram, I think, and tried to remember the number, and we went somewhere into town and saw shops and whatever, and then we lost our way. We thought we’d never find our way back, but eventually we did.

When we came back, there was a guard there who told us off, in Russian of course: why did you go into town, it’s not allowed. There was a kennel, sort of for a dog, in front of where we were staying, and he said, “You go in there, as punishment.” Like a dog in a cage. But it was all a joke. He was laughing his head off, and then he came with a bone, holding it up to me, and all the people came: “Oh God, you poor thing.” But eventually he let me out again.

Brian Rose: And you’re 16 now.

Eva Schloss: Yes, it was my 16th birthday there, and a young Dutch girl who had been on the transport with me made me a birthday present, a necklace of shells.

Brian Rose: So you’re very thankful to the Russians, because they took care of you and liberated you.

Eva Schloss: Definitely. They liberated us and looked after us really very, very well. Simply, but we had enough food and we were kept clean. By that time they had also liberated lots of prisoners of war: Italians, French, all kinds of people, a lot of Australians. The prisoners of war got parcels from the Red Cross, but the people liberated from the camps didn’t get anything from the Red Cross, because the head of the Red Cross was, again, an admirer of Hitler. The Red Cross had power; they could have gone and visited camps or found something out, but they never bothered.

Brian Rose: Really?

Eva Schloss: Yes. And those Australians gave us toothpaste, cigarettes for people who wanted to smoke, chocolate, all from those parcels. And there’s quite a funny story. My mother looked better; she had hair again, and as I say, she was a very beautiful woman. One of them made her a marriage offer. He said, “I’ve got a big estate in Australia with so many sheep, and I need a woman. You look quite a strong woman. Your daughter can come as well, and I’ll look after you.” My mother said, “I’m not a widow. I’ve got a husband and a son.” And he gave her a card: “Write to me if you find out that your husband is not alive. You can always come. I’ll always be happy to have you.”

Brian Rose: This was an Australian who had been fighting for the British and was captured as a prisoner?

Eva Schloss: Exactly. Quite a lot of Australians were prisoners there.

2:05:13 Brian Rose: And when do you travel back to Europe?

Eva Schloss: We had to register, because there were all nationalities, and say where we wanted to go. We wanted to go back to Holland, but there was a Jewish doctor doing the registration, and he said, “But you are not Dutch. Why do you want to go to Holland?” My mother said, “I’m never going to set foot in Austria again. They didn’t want us. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” He had been a prisoner himself as well, but already there was prejudice about nationality again: you should go to Austria, not to Holland. Anyway, he did put us on the Dutch list, but we were very upset about that.

Eventually a New Zealand troop ship came that was going to transport us, and also people going to France, to Italy and elsewhere, and drop us off. Otto Frank was with us on this ship, but he kept to himself. He was sort of depressed, because he was very, very anxious. He had heard that his wife had died, but he hoped his girls had survived.

Brian Rose: So you take the boat through the Black Sea and come round that way.

Eva Schloss: That was May, so it was beautiful weather. It was really very beautiful, and we were treated as human beings. We ate at tables with white tablecloths and proper cutlery, and we had sheets on our beds. That was the first time we were human beings again. But we still took plenty of food, rolls and things, back to our bunks. Then the captain made an announcement: “We have noticed that you take bread and food into the cabins. Don’t do that, because we might get mice. There’s plenty of food. If you’re hungry, just come and ask. You’ll never go hungry on our boat.” But people still did it. It was an obsession: perhaps tomorrow we’ll have nothing to eat.

Brian Rose: What a strange year of your life, from your 15th birthday to your 16th.

Eva Schloss: It was. And then we docked first at Constantinople. Of course we wanted to go out and see it, but we were not allowed. The Turks didn’t want us. They said we might have illnesses and lice, but by that time we were quite clean. Still, they didn’t let us out.

Then they wanted to land in Genoa, and again they didn’t let us out, so we had to go on to Marseilles. We didn’t really mind, because it was beautiful on the ship. Our hair had grown, but we still had a uniform and a few things we had bargained for. We still had nothing, really. When we arrived and got off the ship, there was a band and a buffet with all kinds of food, and we felt very honoured. It turned out later that it was for the French prisoners of war, not for camp people, but we still enjoyed it.

Then we had to travel all the way from Marseilles up to Holland. When we stopped, there were again French people there for the French returners, with wine and food and beer, welcoming people home. But it took a long time; the trains didn’t run properly. Then at the border we couldn’t go on, because the bridge over a river had not been repaired yet. So we had to wait for that, and we were put in a monastery. Every day lots of people came on transports from Germany and elsewhere, and we were always looking for somebody.

Brian Rose: What’s the feeling of the people there? It’s after this crazy war, and there are still German people and French people, some who fought for the resistance and some who didn’t. How does that feel? Or is everyone just happy that it’s over?

Eva Schloss: Yes, we were happy. But we didn’t get in touch with strangers so much. You stayed on the train, with people who had all been liberated, and then in this monastery. We were very anxious to get back home.

Eventually we were taken to Amsterdam, and that was it. We thought there would be some welcome or something, but there was nothing. We had no money, and we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know if our apartment was still available. It was really quite frightening. Suddenly we had to look after ourselves, and that was difficult.

My mother said, “We had friends who were a mixed marriage,” Rosa and Bob, they were called. He was a Jew and his wife was an Austrian non-Jew. “Perhaps they haven’t been deported. Let’s try and go there.” So we went on a tram, and we told the conductor we had no money, but they didn’t really care. We got there and rang the bell, and Mr Rosenbaum opened the door. He did recognise us: “Evi! Fritzi! Where are Erich and Heinz? Where did you come from? Come in, come in.” It looked a bit neglected. There was a spirit burner, and he said, “I can’t give you any food. We haven’t got anything.”

We asked what had happened. Holland was the last occupied country. The others had been freed after the invasion, in September, October and in the new year, but Holland was occupied till the end of the war, and the Germans took everything the Dutch produced to feed the German people. In Holland it was called the Hunger Winter. There were no cats and dogs any more; they had all been eaten. Dutch people went to the farmers and came back with one potato to feed a family of five. They found thousands of bodies in apartments; whole families had starved to death. Even when we came back in June there was still very little food. Nothing was really organised yet.

So we asked, “Where is your wife?” She was in hospital, having just given birth to a baby. And that is funny too. Both of them were very heavy smokers, and they had always wanted children but could never conceive. In the war, when they didn’t have any cigarettes, she became pregnant.

Brian Rose: An interesting little sideline.

Eva Schloss: Yes. Then the wife came home with the baby, and we stayed with them and helped them with the household, and tried to get some food. Slowly, slowly, a bit of food became available.

2:14:21 Brian Rose: When did you find out about your father and your brother?

Eva Schloss: Well, there was nothing to find out yet. Nobody knew anything; it was very big chaos. Then my mother said, “Let’s see what happened to our apartment.” We went there, and it was actually empty. So we went to the lady who owned it, and she said, “Yes, it’s empty. You can go back in.” That was very, very lucky, because Otto Frank had nowhere to go; there were other people living in his flat. All the people who had been taken away and came back really had nowhere to go.

So we stayed there, and we went to the station to see who arrived, and we put an advertisement in the paper asking if anyone had come across them. Otto too went around asking everybody if they had been there or knew anything. Then he found two women who had been in Bergen-Belsen, where the girls were, and who had been on the transport to Auschwitz with them. They recognised them, and they were there when they died, so they could tell him what had happened to his girls.

Then in July we got a letter from the Red Cross saying that my father and brother, with names and dates of birth, had died in Mauthausen, this terrible death camp in Austria, several days before the American army came to liberate the camp.

That was of course the last straw. I didn’t believe it. I said, that can’t be; they must be alive, they’re probably ill somewhere, and they will come back. And it did happen that people came back, even several years later. There were displaced persons camps in Germany where people stayed for four or five years, people who were ill, sometimes in shock and unable to speak, all kinds of stories. So I just didn’t believe it, and that was really very bad, because if you don’t accept it, you wait. Each time I heard a taxi or a car driving up outside, I ran and said, “That must be them.” It took me years to accept that they just wouldn’t come back.

Brian Rose: Is it hard knowing that they were alive days before the Americans came?

Eva Schloss: It was that, of course. And then I thought, how would they know? I didn’t believe it. But they kept records. It’s difficult to understand that, while losing the war, nearly in May, they still kept records of those things. But they had the dates, they had the names, so it must be true. But I just didn’t believe it.

Brian Rose: And what happens to Eva in the next few years? What is it like being you?

Eva Schloss: Well, Otto came and talked to my mother. I didn’t want to go to school. I felt I was an adult, having gone through all this. But he insisted, and I did go back to school, and I actually did very well. I became very studious. But I couldn’t relate to my classmates. I didn’t tell them I had been in the camp, and people didn’t ask.

Brian Rose: But they knew?

Eva Schloss: They didn’t know. You didn’t ask. That is funny, because later, when I donated the paintings to the Resistance Museum, some men, men by then, came up and said, “I am so-and-so. I was with you in school, and I never knew that you were in the camp. I was in a camp too.” We didn’t talk about it.

Brian Rose: And you didn’t know they were Jewish?

Eva Schloss: I think we did know they were Jewish, or we suspected it. But we didn’t talk about anything like that.

Brian Rose: So no one talked about it.

Eva Schloss: No one talked about it.

2:19:01 Brian Rose: Were you angry at people?

Eva Schloss: I was very, very angry with the whole world, because when I started to be a bit more adult and learned history at school, I realised it could have been avoided. People could have helped. America could have taken in more people, and all the countries could have taken refugees. That was really the trouble, and that is something I talk about now: the refugee problem. It is a similar problem again; people have to flee. To leave your own country is not a pleasure. If you go voluntarily, because you marry somebody in another country or have a good job somewhere, it’s different. But if you are forced to leave without your family, without being able to take anything, like those Syrian people fleeing, or those in Libya, or people from Africa because they’re starving, you have to be very brave and very tough to do that. And then not to be welcomed where you come to, to struggle and learn a new language. This should have been made easy for those people whose lives were in danger, and now it’s a similar situation again.

Brian Rose: So we need to be more aware and open to immigration.

Eva Schloss: Exactly. Look what refugees have achieved. A lot of Jewish people here were Kindertransport people. The English let in 10,000 children without their parents, which is better than nothing, but actually quite cruel: separating children from their parents, knowing that those children would probably never see their parents again and that their parents would be killed. Like what Trump is doing now, separating children from their parents.

Brian Rose: So this is what England did.

Eva Schloss: Yes. Those 10,000 children who survived here were looked after, sometimes in families, sometimes in orphanages, and many of them became leading people in science, in politics, doctors, lawyers, all kinds of things.

When I speak in America I say, I’ve got a good tip for President Trump: if he wants to make America great again, he has to get people educated. A good education, not just for the rich who can afford it but right across the board, because among black people and poor people there are lots of wonderful talents, and if we give all those people a good education, then America will be great again. We Jewish people are only about 15 million in the whole world, and we have more Nobel prizes than any other people, because of education. Already in Poland, when we had no money, education was the most important thing: studying the Talmud, training the brain to be sharp. When the first refugees came here in the 1880s from Poland and Russia, poor, with nothing, tailors and so on, the children had to get an education, and that is how we achieved wonderful things. So Trump should invest in education and look at refugees as an asset, as a wonderful thing.

Brian Rose: What else do you see, in the Trump administration or in the world today? How do you see the world today, based on your experience?

Eva Schloss: Well, first of all, we shouldn’t make wars, because they don’t benefit anyone. Look how many soldiers come back from war with mental problems. They can’t just go back to their families as if nothing has happened. They have problems, and then their children have problems, because they haven’t got an ordinary home, because the father doesn’t talk. Besides, where does it say that we are allowed to kill other people? I say we only have to listen to the Ten Commandments. If we kept those, we would have a perfect world. You have to respect everybody, you must not kill, you have to love your neighbour as yourself. Very simple things. That’s all we need. Ten very simple rules, and we would have a perfect world.

And the inequality now: they say 100 people have more money than the whole rest of the world together. What is the point of that? You can’t take it with you. Share what you have got.

Brian Rose: More equality.

Eva Schloss: More equality and, as you said, education, and then we get a decent, good world. If people are happy, if they have enough to eat, they won’t kill each other and commit crimes.

Brian Rose: Are you still angry at the Germans?

Eva Schloss: Not at the Germans, because they are different Germans now. They are innocent. But the leaders, the people who organised this. At one conference they were sitting in a beautiful stately home with food and drink, deciding how they could get rid of six million Jews without it costing a lot of money. Before that they shot people in Poland, but that needed a soldier and a bullet; too expensive. A quick, easy way, and they came up with gassing people. How can you gas children, good people who have not done you any harm? Those people were criminals. But the people who obeyed were cowardly.

And that’s another thing: we have to take an interest in what is going on, and we have to speak up if we see injustice being done, not just say, well, that’s the government, and let it happen. We have a voice. We are strong enough as people to say what we want. But we should be decent and want the right thing, and of course, again, first we have to be educated to know what decent world we really want to live in.

Brian Rose: Do the people have a choice?

Eva Schloss: Yes, I think we have a choice. We say we are a democracy, which means people have a voice, but I think it’s not quite democracy any more, because we don’t always have a voice. We should get the government we want, because we are a democracy and we have a voice. The previous mayor, who has resigned now, Boris: when he was mayor he got water cannons, and people said, “We don’t want water cannons.” He said, “Well, I’m not going to use them.” But why buy them? We don’t want water cannons, we don’t want tear gas. If people want to demonstrate peacefully, you have to let them demonstrate, hear what they say, let them go to Parliament and say what they want. That is a proper democracy, not going against them with water cannons.

Brian Rose: What did you think of the Nuremberg trials?

Eva Schloss: Only very, very few people were caught. Mengele got away.

Brian Rose: They never found Mengele.

Eva Schloss: He was never found, but he must have died by now. He got away, and a lot of those Nazis escaped through the Vatican. They got money and false papers and were helped to get to Brazil and Argentina, living under other names, and had a good life again, many of them. And that is why, I suppose, you have a right-wing party in Germany again. A lot of those young Nazi boys, the SS and so on, took off their uniforms and went back to their towns and villages and were welcomed by their friends and family, and lived there. Propaganda is very, very powerful. They really believed that they were doing the right thing and that Hitler was a god, and they are still collecting things from the Nazi time. There are still Nazis around, because they didn’t all get caught.

Brian Rose: Does that scare you?

Eva Schloss: Well, it is scary, yes. The whole way the world is going is scary. And the atom bomb: too many nations have it. When America used it against Japan, they didn’t know; they thought it was just a massive bomb, but they didn’t know about the radiation. This is something we really have to be afraid of. Why do you think so many people have cancer? That is all from radiation and from bad water and things. We are already affected by all this. When the wind came after Chernobyl, it spread all over the world. And in Japan, when the nuclear plant leaked, it went into the sea, the fish, the water, all radioactive. This is a big, big danger to mankind. We will destroy our planet if we are not careful.

Brian Rose: Are there still reparations that need to be made by Germany?

Eva Schloss: Austria said, “We were victims ourselves,” which of course is not true. Germany has helped Israel; Israel would never have got as far as it has without a lot of help from Germany. And when I was in New York I met the organisation which still gets reparations. Germany has to pay for another nine years, I think, and they still get I don’t know how many millions or billions to help different Jewish causes, and survivors still get help if they need it. So Germany has seen its guilt and is sorry for it. And Angela Merkel: Germany was the only country in the world that took in a million refugees. I think that is still a feeling of guilt.

Brian Rose: What about the guilt of the young Germans? Because you see them.

Eva Schloss: I see them, and they’re very, very sorry. Some of them do feel guilty, but they also feel it has nothing to do with them; they have not done any harm. But some of them know their grandfather or great-grandfather did terrible things, and they’re very upset about that. I have met really good Germans. I didn’t go to Germany for many, many years, and even if I heard German spoken, which is my mother tongue, I got shivers. But that has all passed now. I’ve been to Germany and I speak there as well, and the children are very interested. Every high school pupil has to go and visit a camp, so they know the history; they know what happened.

Brian Rose: And that’s important to you. That’s why you’re still talking.

Eva Schloss: Yes. I think we have to learn; we have to know what happened, so that it is a lesson and we don’t repeat it. But unfortunately, as I say, we have not succeeded in that. We still do terrible things.

Brian Rose: I remember in the Balkan war we saw camps. What’s that like for you to see?

Eva Schloss: Christians killed Muslims and Muslims killed Christians who had been living together in harmony for centuries. This is world politics. The whole Middle East was Turkey, and even the Balkans were largely occupied by the Turks. It was the biggest empire in the world, the Turkish empire. But Turkey fought in the First World War with Germany, so it was punished, and all this was taken away from it. That was a big, big mistake by the Allies, again: they just divided the Middle East into different countries, drawing lines across, putting together people who didn’t belong together, who didn’t know each other, who even spoke with different accents. This is why the Middle East has not been right since the First World War, and this is where all the trouble is. Palestine was not really a country; they just made this Palestine, and the people who lived there were Palestinians, but many were nomads.

And of course I don’t agree with Israel’s policy of taking more and more land. That’s another thing I’m quite upset about. I speak a lot in Muslim schools here, for instance, and I always get the question, what do you think about a Jewish soldier killing a Palestinian child? And I say that is terrible. I used to say, we Jews are very few people and we value life very much; we would never kill anybody for the sake of killing. Now I can’t say that, because they do kill people. But Israel recognised the division after the United Nations decided we had a right to our own country, and the Palestinians have never accepted that Israel has a right to exist. Hamas still say, “We want to throw you into the sea; you have no right to be here.” So basically there is a war. They’re not really fighting a war as such, but there is no peace. People do fight. It’s a very bad situation. Unless there is peace between them and they accept each other, there will be this destruction.

2:36:19 Brian Rose: How did Eva heal? Over the next 30 or 40 years, how did you not stay angry?

Eva Schloss: Well, I was bitter for many, many years. But I think it was the births. They say there was bromide in the liquid we got in the camp. I don’t know, but we had no periods in the camp; that’s a fact. Nobody had a period, and that is supposed to be from the bromide. When I came back I had a lot of digestive problems, and when I married I wanted a family, because that is what I was living for: to have children, to have a lovely, good family like we had. And nothing happened. We tried for two years, and then I went to a women’s hospital on the Euston Road and had all kinds of tests. I was short of certain things, so I had hormone treatment for six months, and suddenly I was able to conceive. That was the next miracle, I thought. So the birth of my first daughter was something really very, very special for me.

I still hated the Germans, but I became more, well, it was a terrible, terrible thing, but we are here, we made a life, I’m going to have a family. It became easier. I started to go to synagogue more. We had three daughters. And I became quite a different person from the child I was. As I say, I had not been interested in learning, more in playing and sport, but I became interested, went to lectures. My husband was a very, very intelligent man, and I learned a lot. I went to all kinds of evening classes, and I was particularly interested in history.

Then I realised that every Western country has done terrible things: America with the Native Americans, England with the Boers in South Africa and with India, France with Indochina, which is Vietnam, the Dutch as well. And what we did to Africa: we took all their riches away and gave them nothing in return. The superiority of Europeans, or white people, is ridiculous. When the Europeans went to China, we were called the barbarians, because the Chinese had a much older culture. When we were still living in caves, they were already very educated and cultured and making beautiful things. So this racism is just ridiculous. We are not superior. We are all equal, and if we all get the same chance in life, we will all be the same.

So there’s a lot of education to be done, and I’m trying to achieve a little bit. There’s a saying, if you change one life, you’ve changed the world. I don’t quite agree with that, but I do get amazing letters from people saying that they have changed their attitude. So I have a little influence, and I think all the Holocaust survivors who speak and write books influence people. But it’s not enough.

Brian Rose: Are you tired of telling your story?

Eva Schloss: No, because audiences react differently. On my next tour there’s one event where they want me to do two talks in one day, and I said no. I used to do that quite a lot, but now I think I must get off the subject for a while, for a day at least.

Brian Rose: Does the world scare you now, more so than since the end of the war? Is it the worst it’s been?

Eva Schloss: Perhaps it isn’t worse. But at that time, after the war, we had hope, and we had a determination that things would be different. We were working towards a better world. Remember how people protested against the atom bomb, chaining themselves to things? Now they let them make as many nuclear weapons as they like, and nobody cares any more. That’s dangerous.

Brian Rose: Because we’re less on guard.

Eva Schloss: We’re less on guard, and we don’t seem to care. As I say, I’ve got five grandchildren. One was married, to an Australian, and I thought I was going to become a great-grandmother. I was looking forward to that. As it happens, she’s divorced now and has no children. Before, I would have said life without children is hopeless; that’s what you are for, to carry on your family. But now I say, I don’t know, perhaps one shouldn’t put more children into the world. They might just suffer terribly.

Brian Rose: Do you think so?

Eva Schloss: Well, I’m afraid. Yes, I’m afraid.

Brian Rose: Will we ever repeat the things that happened?

Eva Schloss: Well, with atomic weapons: Trump said he would use them if he had to. And even Theresa May said something that shocked me: she said if she had to press the button, she would. What damage that would cause, because it would not be one side; the other party would do it as well, and that’s it. I see how people suffer; my mother-in-law just died of cancer. It’s a terrible illness, terrible suffering, and imagine that all our young people would get cancer and suffer. It’s just unthinkable, horrible.

2:43:25 Brian Rose: I want to talk about your brother’s paintings, because you found them when you came back. What was that like?

Eva Schloss: After Otto got the diary, which gave him a purpose in life, I said to my mother, “Heinz told me about the paintings. We must go and get them.” But they were in the house of the woman who had been blackmailing them, and she was really the cause of what had happened to them. My mother said, “I don’t think I could face that woman.” But I said, “We have to go and get the paintings.” So we did, and luckily she had disappeared and other people were living there, and we really did find 30 paintings, which are amazing.

Brian Rose: 30 paintings.

Eva Schloss: Yes, all big oil paintings. People ask me how they got the material. Well, the Dutch were always painting, but in the war they didn’t, so you could buy paint. Some paintings are on a dishcloth. And an oil painting has to be mounted on a stretcher, but they couldn’t get wood. So each painting, when it was finished, they took off with the little nails, and it was flat. That’s why 30 could go under the floorboards. If they had been on wood, they wouldn’t have fitted.

A few years ago I donated them to the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, and they made a big exhibition. They don’t display them all now. When I was in Durban in South Africa, I gave a talk there; I gave a lot of talks there, and I spoke about Heinz and his artwork and his poetry. He wrote lovely poems as well. And they said that would be a lovely exhibition to make, not instead of the Anne Frank exhibition but about another child with a different background, and the heritage he left behind in the paintings. So they made an exhibition, and it travelled to Cape Town and to Swaziland, even Zululand wanted it, and Johannesburg. Then they made a copy for England. So we actually have two copies. One was at the Holocaust museum near Nottingham, which had an exhibition but doesn’t have it permanently, because it’s quite difficult to move. Then they made another copy for travelling to schools, and that is at the Jewish Museum. So if a school or anybody wants an exhibition of the paintings, they can get it, and it’s easy to put up: his paintings, his story and some of his poems.

2:46:54 Brian Rose: What do you want people to remember about this conversation? What’s the thing they can take away and never forget?

Eva Schloss: Well, there’s a lot. First of all, the evil of discrimination, of racism, and even religious discrimination. I went to school in Holland, and in the 1500s Holland was occupied by Catholic Spain. Then the Reformation started and the Dutch became Protestant, and there was an 80-year war between Catholics and Protestants killing each other. The same religion, with slightly different ideas. It’s the same with the Muslims: the same religion, slightly different ideas, Sunni and Shia, killing each other. This is completely incomprehensible. Religion is something very personal: what you believe, how you act accordingly, whether you go to a church, whether you believe in a God in three persons or in one God. Let people believe what they want. I can’t understand that. So that is one thing.

Then, as I said, race. We are not a superior race. You might think it’s easier to be white, but brown or yellow or black people are just as good. So accept them, give them the same chance, the same education, and then I think there will be fewer wars, if we accept each other for who we are and live in harmony together. Wars only benefit the very, very rich, with the weapons industry. That is the biggest income America has, weapons, and Saudi Arabia, such an intolerant country, is our best friend. That’s ridiculous. We should tell them, unless you have human rights in your country, we are not going to deal with you any more. We could do that. But no, we want their money.

So there are a lot of things people have to learn and realise. There are very, very rich people who are very unhappy. Money doesn’t make you happy.

Brian Rose: So make the right choices. Don’t just do it for the money.

Eva Schloss: Yes. And share. If you have a lot of money, if you are lucky enough to have made it, then don’t sit on it. Share it. Americans, that’s one very good thing, are very charitable; they give away a lot of money. But nevertheless the difference between rich and poor is still much too big. Some individuals have much too much money: they have islands and private jets and yachts. You are only one person; you can’t be in all those places. If you want to go on a yacht, you can always hire it. You don’t have to have your own yacht and your own plane.

And even then they have too much money. The trillions: we had never heard of trillions. First it was millions, then billions, and now it’s even trillions. But it’s an illness: the more money you have, the more you want to amass. For what? I went to a Greek funeral, and most of it was in Greek, but some was translated, and in the prayer it said that when you die you have to leave everything behind, all your riches. You can’t take it with you. I thought, well, that’s true.

Brian Rose: And we also need to be careful about our liberties, when they get taken away from us little by little.

Eva Schloss: We have to be careful, yes. We have to see what’s going on. We have a voice, and we have to get together. Look what the Conservative Party is doing now. We are trying to get Brexit done, so be one party, let them work together and not stab each other in the back so that Boris can become prime minister. Trump told Theresa May that Boris would be a good prime minister. How tactless can you get? She is prime minister; she has been chosen. Let her try to do her job and get us out of this mess. But no, they all have to work against her. And then of course Europe has a chance to be even more awkward. If we were united, Europe would cooperate. It’s all ego.

Brian Rose: It’s a lot of ego.

Eva Schloss: There’s a lot of ego. But I think the Muslims even say that in everybody there is a little bit of God. So something good is in everybody, and if you have this goodness, try to enlarge it and suppress your not-so-good things. We have to work on ourselves.

What I find so very sad now is that so many young people have depression. That wasn’t so in our time. Things were difficult; my mother told me about the First World War and how hungry they were, but they didn’t have depression. You had to try to make the most of the situation you were in. When I asked my grandchildren, three of them go to counselling. I said, “What problems have you got?” “Oh, we have terrible problems.” If they can’t get their computer working, it’s terrible.

And another thing I think is very dangerous is those computer games where it’s all shooting and killing: the more you kill, the better it is. And the knife crime here. How terrible is it that young people can’t go and play peacefully in the street together without someone coming with a knife? How can a 16-year-old have a big knife and stab somebody in the chest? Where does that idea come from? It must have come from a game. And the films as well: half the films are about crimes and the police chasing criminals. We should not show all those criminal things. In the old days we had lovely, happy films. But people want excitement through nastiness. As I say, we were not rich, we were well off, but we were happy with whatever we had. We didn’t have luxuries. Now the world has changed; the attitude of people has changed very much.

Brian Rose: Eva, it’s amazing to get your perspective on everything, on the world as it is now and on everything that happened to you. It fascinates me that this happened so recently. 74 years ago you were there in this camp. It was so recent, and yet it seems like a long time ago to me. I see the films and I read the history, but it doesn’t seem like the Germany I know.

Eva Schloss: No, but Germany is very nice now, a very, very decent country. One of the most decent.

Brian Rose: But I think it’s really important that we listen to your entire story. So thank you for repeating your story over and over again and for detailing all of these things. I know it took you 40 years to write your book, and I know there’s been a lot of trauma in talking about these things, but I think it’s important that everyone listens to every single detail, because they’re all very important.

Eva Schloss: The details are important. A few plays have been made about my life. And a lot is on the internet, which is good, because we can share a lot of information, good information and bad information. A woman in America has seen the paintings and wants to make a play out of them. I said, “Well, you don’t know anything about my brother,” and in the last three or four days I’ve had about six emails from her telling me her ideas. She has already written some of it. So that’s good; I would like it. And yesterday a man wanted to make a film about my life. I said, “There’s already one film being made. I can’t do too much.” But people are interested. People want to know. But it’s not just to know; it’s to act afterwards as well, and that I don’t know yet. Some people do, but not enough.

Brian Rose: Well, I think seeing you in person and knowing your story is so powerful. So thank you for the time. I really appreciate this, and your perspective on everything else. Thank you for being here to tell this story, for dealing with this trauma and giving us the details, because I think it’s really important.

Eva Schloss: Thank you.

Brian Rose: On our show we say it’s about the journey, and I wish you well on yours.

Eva Schloss: Thank you. Thank you.

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