Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank - Hardcover

Schloss, Eva; Kent, Evelyn Julia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312029136 ISBN 13: 9780312029135

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1989

Synopsis

This is the true story of courage, survival, and hope against all odds that charts a turbulent journey through war-torn Europe, from the secret hiding places in Dutch homes to the horrific realm of the Nazi concentration camps. Eva Schloss, like her schoolmate Anne Frank, was deported to Auschwitz while in her teens, and in this absorbing memoir--a story she has withheld from even her closest friends for nearly forty-five years--she recounts the terror she and Anne and thousands of Jewish girls like them knew.
Eva Schloss's personal history represents in microcosm the ever intensifying process of degradation and destruction of European Jewish life that began even before the Second World War. Born to successful parents in Vienna, Eva and her family were forced by the German annexation of Austria to seek refuge, first in Belgium, then in Holland, giving up their friends, their accustomed way of life, and their livelihoods. With each move, their freedom became more limited, until their entire world was encompassed by the tiny hidden rooms in Amsterdam apartments provided by a network of neighbors and friends who became increasingly unreliable as the Nazi occupation clamped down. For two years they lived this way, Eva with her mother, Eva's father and brother secluded elsewhere. On Eva's fifteenth birthday, the family was reunited--by the Gestapo. Soon they were on board the cattle cars to Auschwitz.
There, their concerns turned from evading capture to fighting death. Again the family was separated. Eva's hopes of returning with her family to freedom, fueled by occasional clandestine meetings with her father, were constantly dashed by the reality of the prison camp's barbarism, by the ever-present fear of being "selected," either for the gas chambers or--what was worse--for Dr. Mengele's infamous experiments.
This moving first-person account, told without rancor or sentimentality, is a testament to the power of human beings to survive and even triumph in the most inhumane of circumstances. Eva's Story, while a lasting contribution to the literature of the Holocaust, speaks directly to everyone.

About this title

About the Author:

Eva Schloss and Evelyn Julia Kent

From Library Journal:

Almost 50 years now separate the children of today from the generation of Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. Perhaps this is one factor that compelled two women, both now grandmothers, to record the painful years they spent as young girls in the death camps of Poland. Libraries probably will find more demand for Eva's Story , since Schloss is the posthumous stepsister of Anne Frank, whom she knew in Amsterdam. With her family she was able to rely on a network of Dutch Gentiles to hide her through the first years of World War II. On her 15th birthday, however, informers betrayed her, her mother, father, and sister. Deported to Auschwitz, she survived thanks to a combination of luck and the fierce love she and her mother shared. Graf, a Polish Jew, was a university student when the German invasion shattered her world. She survived the first years of the German occupation by fleeing to Soviet-occupied sections of Poland. But, like Schloss, her luck ran out. Her camp, Plaszow, equaled Auschwitz in terrors. Again, like Schloss, Graf relied upon the deep affection and support of her sisters to survive. Both books are recommended for their demonstration that courage, familial love, and an inner resistance still flourished even in the deepest horrors of the Holocaust.
- Ann H. Sullivan, Tompkins Cortland Community Coll. Lib., Dryden, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0312029136
• ISBN 13: 9780312029135
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224