On November 18th at the Lory Student center this year’s 23rd annual Holocaust Awareness Week was held. A week dedicated to recognizing the significance and remembering the victims, there was a very special speaker, Eva Schloss. Not many people may know of her, but you definitely have heard of her stepsister and childhood friend, Anne Frank.
At the age of 90, Schloss is still spending much of her days traveling and speaking about her experience during the Holocaust and time spent at the Auschwitz concentration camp. In 1985 she chose to devote her life to awareness of the events of the Holocaust and promoting global peace.
The event was rightfully titled “A Historic Evening with a Holocaust Survivor”, organized by the club Students for Holocaust Awareness. The event was sold-out and the LSC was full of eager attendees who had begun to line up two hours prior to the event start time, many even brought their own copies of Schloss’s book. The line for people who hoped to grab an extra seat winded well down the hall.
“I traveled four hours to attend the event,” explained Ramona McConnell, she had traveled all the way from Pueblo just to attend the event that night, “I was a nurse in Berlin and have heard the stories but never from a survivor like her.” Her comment was similar to others. Many had heard stories, but none had the opportunity to experience it firsthand.
When Schloss took the stage, the standing ovation and applause was deafening. She was interviewed by Romi Bean from CBS Denver, who had also interviewed her in Boulder. She spoke of having a beautiful childhood in Austria, until the Nazi’s began taking over control of European countries. Her family went into hiding in 1942 where they remained until 1944, when they were betrayed by a double agent and transported to Auschwitz. Schloss and her mother were liberated by Soviet soldiers in 1945. Sadly, her brother and father did not survive the camps.
When asked how she survived the camps and maintained her sanity in hiding she replied, “I wanted to live and experience life, I was too stubborn to die.” It’s a story of phenomenal resilience and strength.
In the years after the war Schloss moved to London, where she met her husband and her mother, Elfriede Geiringer, married Otto Frank. In the years after Otto’s death, Schloss began speaking for the first time about her experience and helped continue promoting Anne Franks’ story.
Her final message of the night was simple, “Do not let this happen again”. Even after all she has experienced and lost, she still believes,“there can be a world free of hate and fighting.” I believe we could all do to think about what Schloss promotes. We are all human, we need to take care of each other and take care of our world.
