After Auschwitz : a story of heartbreak and survival by the stepsister of Anne Frank

by Eva Schloss

Other authorsKaren Bartlett (Author)

Paperback, 2013

Status

Available

Call number

940.5318 SCH

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Hodder (2013), Edition: Illustrated, 326 pages

Description

Eva was arrested by the Nazis on her fifteenth birthday and sent to Auschwitz. Her survival depended on endless strokes of luck, her own determination and the love and protection of her mother Fritzi, who was deported with her. When Auschwitz was liberated, Eva and Fritzi began the long journey home. They searched desperately for Eva's father and brother, from whom they had been separated. The news came some months later. Tragically, both men had been killed. Before the war, in Amsterdam, Eva had become friendly with a young girl called Anne Frank. Though their fates were very different, Eva's life was set to be entwined with her friend's for ever more, after her mother Fritzi married Anne's father Otto Frank in 1953. This is a searingly honest account of how an ordinary person survived the Holocaust. Eva's memories and descriptions are heartbreakingly clear, her account brings the horror as close as it can possibly be. But this is also an exploration of what happened next, of Eva's struggle to live with herself after the war and to continue the work of her step-father Otto, ensuring that the legacy of Anne Frank is never forgotten.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member SusannahPK_83

This heartfelt account of surviving the horrors of Auschwitz was a book I recoiled from but also intrigued me. I could not put it down.
Eva's journey from being an inmate at the notorious camp, to eventually becoming the stepdaughter of Otto Frank is certainly very well written and very sobering.
I

was fascinated to hear about her recollections of Otto Frank and his reactions to the deaths of his past family.

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LibraryThing member john257hopper

This is the autobiography of Eva Schloss, a young Austrian Jew who knew Anne Frank in Amsterdam after they all ended up there in the late 1930s. She survived Auschwitz with her mother Fritzi; her father Erich and brother Heinz died in Mauthausen after being forcibly marched there after Auschwitz

was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. After the war they returned to Amsterdam, where her mother married Otto Frank in 1953, while she had moved to London. Only a small proportion of the book deals with her horrific experiences in Auschwitz; the bulk of it deals with her post-war life, her and her mother's attempts to build a new life, while coping with the psychological stress and depression of coming to terms with the fact that Erich and Heinz would never return. Latterly, since the 1980s, Eva was one of the founders and has been an ongoing inspirational light of the Anne Frank Trust, which campaigns against all forms of prejudice by working with schools, prisons and others. Hers is an example of a life dedicated to trying to ensure that such horrors are not repeated, whatever the underlying prejudice in a particular incidence.

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LibraryThing member Helen.Hunter

A good insightful read from a girls perspective, who ends up related to the father of Anne Frank and gives us an inside look to his dedication to his daughters diary,

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