num_pages: 224
description: This is the true story of courage, survival, and hope against all odds that charts a turbulent journey through war-torn Europe, from the secret hiding places in Dutch homes to the horrific realm of the Nazi concentration camps. Eva Schloss, like her schoolmate Anne Frank, was deported to Auschwitz while in her teens, and in this absorbing memoir--a story she has withheld from even her closest friends for nearly forty-five years--she recounts the terror she and Anne and thousands of Jewish girls like them knew.Eva Schloss's personal history represents in microcosm the ever intensifying process of degradation and destruction of European Jewish life that began even before the Second World War. Born to successful parents in Vienna, Eva and her family were forced by the German annexation of Austria to seek refuge, first in Belgium, then in Holland, giving up their friends, their accustomed way of life, and their livelihoods. With each move, their freedom became more limited, until their entire world was encompassed by the tiny hidden rooms in Amsterdam apartments provided by a network of neighbors and friends who became increasingly unreliable as the Nazi occupation clamped down. For two years they lived this way, Eva with her mother, Eva's father and brother secluded elsewhere. On Eva's fifteenth birthday, the family was reunited--by the Gestapo. Soon they were on board the cattle cars to Auschwitz.There, their concerns turned from evading capture to fighting death. Again the family was separated. Eva's hopes of returning with her family to freedom, fueled by occasional clandestine meetings with her father, were constantly dashed by the reality of the prison camp's barbarism, by the ever-present fear of being "selected," either for the gas chambers or--what was worse--for Dr. Mengele's infamous experiments.This moving first-person account, told without rancor or sentimentality, is a testament to the power of human beings to survive and even triumph in the most inhumane of circumstances. Eva's Story, while a lasting contribution to the literature of the Holocaust, speaks directly to everyone.
language: English
title: Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank
titlecomplete: Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank
genres: Holocaust, Biography, History, Autobiography, World War II, Historical, War, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Memoir
ratings_count: 6763
publisher: St Martins Pr