Anne Frank's Step Sister: 'How I Survived the Holocaust' Part 1

Dan Snow's History Hit

1/2. On the morning of the 4th of August 1944, exactly 78 years ago today, the Frank family cowered behind a bookshelf in Amsterdam, listening to heavy boots and German voices on the other side. Anne Frank and her family were discovered and taken to the Nazi concentration camps where they all perished, apart from Otto. Anne's diary stops in the summer of 1944 so it's difficult for us to truly know exactly what her experience was after her arrest, as a teenage girl enduring the horrors of the Nazi death machine.

But Eva Schloss, the girl who became her stepsister - does. She was sent to Auschwitz with her parents and older brother Heinz and remembers what that whole experience was like - from the way Austrians slowly turned on their Jewish neighbours, hiding in crawl spaces from Nazis, the cattle truck ride, her encounters with the angel of death Josef Mengele and how the liberation of Auschwitz left her stranded in the abandoned camp for days.

Eva's is a story of close calls, unexplainable chances and turns of fortune, as well as unimaginable horrors. So, a warning that some parts of this story are distressing.

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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