For almost everyone, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is the key formative text about the Holocaust: the first book on the subject they will have read – the journal of a Jewish girl hiding with her family in the secret annexe of an office building in Amsterdam, and running from 1942 to 1944, when her voice suddenly, eerily stops. This is when the Franks were discovered and taken away by the Nazis. The rest is silence. There is no first-person description of what happened next – which is partly why the Anne Frank diary has been perennially acceptable as a book for schoolchildren. For generations, the white, blank endpapers of any edition have gestured at the nothingness, the void, the unimaginable nature of what followed. In the diary, the whole question of the future is fraught with irony and tragedy. Anne yearns for the time after the war, when she hopes to become known as a famous writer: “I want to go on living after my death!”
Only very recently did I read an extraordinary book that tackles the unanswered questions of Anne Frank’s diary, all the whats and what-ifs, and it deserves to be read at least as widely: a standalone classic. It is After Auschwitz, a memoir by Eva Schloss. She was born into a Jewish family in the elegant Vienna of Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig; after the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, they fled via Belgium to Amsterdam, where she became a friend of Anne Frank and her sister Margot.
Eva went into hiding at about the same time, was captured at about the same time, and was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where her father and brother perished. But Eva and her mother, Fleur, survived there long enough to be liberated by Soviet troops, after stomach-wrenching twists of fate that make this book more gripping than any thriller. Anne and Margot Frank had died in Bergen-Belsen and their mother in Auschwitz, but their father, Otto, survived and remarried Fleur after the war, making Schloss Anne Frank’s posthumous stepsister.
The postwar story of Schloss’s educational work with the Anne Frank Trust since the 1980s is deeply, quietly moving. It is a gripping piece of 20th-century history, written with journalist Karen Bartlett. Schloss pulls no punches in her descriptions of the ordeal in Auschwitz-Birkenau: something like this is what happened to Anne and everyone else. Unlike the mystery of who betrayed the Frank family, Schloss knew who betrayed her own family and gives a crisp, sharp, unillusioned description of the lenient way these people were tried and given soft sentences in Holland after the war. And the strangest question of all: what might have happened if Anne Frank had stayed in hiding and got away with it? Here again, Eva describes a family friend in Amsterdam who achieved precisely this – but was permanently scarred psychologically by an unresolved fear that could never go away.
After the war, Schloss married and raised a family in the UK and became a crucial part of the Anne Frank Trust. The book shows that, however else Ken Livingstone may have disgraced himself recently, he and the Greater London Council in the 1980s played a vital role in bringing the Anne Frank exhibition to the UK and in encouraging Schloss to speak about her experiences.
I myself met the author when I was 17, and in my clueless teenager way, didn’t properly grasp who she was. I was acting in a school play with Schloss’s daughter Sylvia, and met Schloss and her husband, Zvi, after the performance. I had heard of a family connection with Anne Frank, but the full story only properly dawned on me 20 years later when I visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and picked up a copy of Schloss’s earlier book, Eva’s Story.
After Auschwitz is an incredible book, remarkable for its unflinching gaze at the past and also for its hope. For some reason, the most moving part for me is a description of how, forced by the Nazi curfew to be at home every evening at 8pm, Schloss’s family became hooked on bridge. She writes: “I can’t prove it, but we played so much I believe I became one of the most outstanding, and committed child bridge players in the whole of Europe.” The tenderness and poignancy of that image of the child bridge player – but also her toughness and will to win – is unforgettable.
