Anne Frank's Step Sister: 'How I Survived the Holocaust' Part 2

Dan Snow's History Hit

2/2. Eva Schloss remembers her days as a girl in Amsterdam playing in the street with the other children including Anne Frank who, for a time, took a particular interest in her older brother Heinz. Eva also remembers the day the Dutch resistance worker exposed her family to the Nazis and they were carted off to Auschwitz. She remembers the train pulling up to the platform in Poland and the promise she made her brother to go back to find the paintings he'd done in hiding, if he didn't make it out alive.

After being selected to live by Josef Mengele, Eva and her mother entered Auschwitz-Birkenau while her brother and father were sent to a men's camp. There they endured starvation, back-breaking work, blistering summers and freezing winter.

In Part 2 of Eva's story, she describes stumbling across Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father while trying to find help after the liberation of the camp left her stranded with no idea what to do next. The story of Otto and her mother falling in love and finding happiness in the years after and how, after many years of nightmares and silence, Eva finally found her voice to tell her astonishing story of survival, which she still does to this day.

You can listen to Part 1 first here.

Her memoir is called After Auschwitz: A Story of Heartbreak and Survival by the Stepsister of Anne Frank

This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges, the assistant producer was Hannah Ward and the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.

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