After Auschwitz: A story of heartbreak and survival by the stepsister of Anne Frank (Extraordinary Lives, Extraordinary Stories of World War Two Book 1)

by Eva Schloss

Anne’s story is that of a young girl who has touched the whole world through the simple humanity of her diary.

Today there are still many people who look for scapegoats based on the colour of someone’s skin, their background, their sexuality – or their religion.

however deep your despair, there is always hope. Life is very precious and beautiful – and no one should waste it.

‘Everything you do leaves something behind; nothing gets lost. All the good you have accomplished will continue in the lives of the people you have touched. It will make a difference to someone, somewhere, sometime, and your achievements will be carried on. Everything is connected like a chain that cannot be broken.’

My experiences revealed that people have a unique capacity for cruelty, brutality and sheer indifference to human suffering. It is easy to say that good and evil exist within each of us but I have seen the unedifying reality of that at close hand, and it has led me to a lifetime of wondering about the human soul.

Recovering from traumatic events and loss is such a slow and gradual process that at the time you can hardly recognise your snail’s pace back to normality. Of course, there are days when I am still very sad, upset and reflective, but I can tell anyone who is in the depths of depression or despair that in time it is possible to get over things, and move on with your life.

To give you some sense of the staggering number of people under investigation, a total of 450,000 dossiers were compiled. Nearly half of those were forwarded to the prosecutor and 50,000 people appeared before tribunals, while 16,000 were tried in Special Courts.

You believe that you will always remember clearly the people you love – but as time passes you start to remember only the memory of your memories.

The doctors told me that when old people have a stroke they often withhold food and liquid to let them die. I was well aware that Mutti was nearing the ending of her life – but I was outraged by this suggestion.

I would not allow my mother, who had lived through the Holocaust, to be killed by the NHS. I still find the idea of starving people to death deeply disturbing and I am never convinced by medical claims that the patients do not realise what is happening to them.

‘Remember the nocturnal procession of children, of more children, and more children, so frightened, so quiet, so beautiful,’ he said. ‘If we could simply look at one, our

heart would break. But it did not break the hearts of the murderers.’

My dream is that someone will pick it up, long after I am dead, and be shocked and astonished to discover that this was once how the world was. Persecuting people because they are Jewish – or because they are black, or because they are Gypsies, or Muslims, or gay – will seem as ridiculous, inhuman and outrageous as the slave trade appears to us now.

It makes me smile when I hear people talk about the endless conflicts that rage in other parts of the world, like Africa, compared to the ‘civilised’ way we go about things in Europe. I can tell you that not so long ago Europe was not very ‘civilised’ at all.

I grew up in what was far from a wonderful world, but I have still found a life with much joy and love in it, and my deepest regret is only that Pappy and Heinz could not share it with me.