Eva Schloss visited Las Cruces
recently. She left wisdom and hope, and took with her hundreds of
hearts.
When Eva's eleven, her family escapes
Nazi-controlled Vienna and arrives in Amsterdam. A neighbor girl,
Anne Frank, befriends her. Eva has just arrived. She's shy. Anne
isn't. They become friends. Anne, already interested in boys, is
curious about Eva's older brother, a talented musician.
They are safe. Holland did not
participate in World War I, and was not invaded.
But now, suddenly, the Nazis come. At
first, this makes little difference. Soon there are annoying
restraints, but nothing life-threatening. Then that changes. In
1942, they all go into hiding. Anne keeps a diary. Eva's brother
cannot play music. He takes up painting. His paintings survive,
hidden under floorboards.
In 1944, they are betrayed. Both
families are arrested and transported East. That means death camps
in Germany and Poland. They know this from listening to BBC reports,
each starting with the famous first chords of Beethoven's Fifth. For
once, the situation warrants those dramatic chords.
Auschwitz. Bergen-Belsen. They line
up five-by-five. Dr. Mengele glances at each person and makes a
sign. Healthy enough to live, to the left. Otherwise, right, to the
showers that are not showers.
Guards joke about the showers. Eva's
mother has given her a coat and hat. The hat's wide brim keeps
Mengele from noticing Eva is but fifteen. She lives. For now.
Separation by sexes. Men part from
wives and daughters, mothers from sons.
Heads shaved. Piles of clothing.
Take a dress, or an overcoat, something. No underwear. Grab two
shoes from a pile. They are not in pairs. No time to try 'em on.
Wooden bunks. No pads or pillows.
Each morning, foul-tasting water. All day, work. At night, bread.
Some try saving bread for morning. But there's nowhere to hide it.
Sleep on it, someone steals it and eats it.
They are skeletons. If you run, your
shoes fall off. Eva goes barefoot for weeks, even in snow.
Her mother is taken away, does not
return; she must be dead.
Then the Nazis are gone, fleeing the
Russians. Eva finds her mother! Anne's father, Otto, is alive! But
not Eva's father or brother – or Otto's family. They do not leave
the camp. Her mother can barely walk.
The Russians come. There is soup.
Eva gorges herself – and “never had a worse night on a bucket.”
Many die. There's still fighting. The Russians remove them to
Odessa, on the Black Sea.
They return to Amsterdam. Otto Frank,
alone, visits often. Eva is “full of hatred.” Otto, who had
lost everyone, says, “If you hate people, they won't know, but you
will feel it.”
A German Jewish refugee asks Eva to
marry him and move to Israel. She says no; she cannot leave her
mother. Then Otto and her mother decide to marry. Eva says yes.
They move to London. They're happily married until his death in
2016.
Eva cannot have children. That foul
water contained bromide, and “our female things didn't work
properly.” But treatment succeeds. Eva says her three daughters
saved her.
Eva speaks not only for Jews. She
speaks for blacks, for brown refugees, even for Muslims. She speaks
against hatred. Because we haven't learned, and ethnic prejudices
are on the rise again. She has seen the worst of life – and would
spare everyone that.
She is hopeful. The flowers are
blooming.
-30-
[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 24 March, 2019, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper';s website and KRWG's website. A spoken version will air Wednesday and Saturday on KRWG Radio, and Thursday on KTAL-LP, 101.5 FM (streamable at www.lccommunityradio.org).]
[The cat, Bear, insists on jumping into
my lap. He sits watching me type. I hug him. He knows nothing of
all this, of course. He will discourage visiting cats from venturing
into his garden, but otherwise sees no need to molest others of his
kind. Even if we shared a language, I doubt I could explain logically to
Bear the reasons we kill and mistreat each other, all over the world
– and why comfortable citizens in Germany or the U.S. or so many other nations can
be convinced in the name of fear to approve all kinds of inhumanity?
“Why,” I imagine Bear asking, “do
you call it 'inhumanity,' as if kindness and tolerance and caring
were particularly human, when these absurd stories you are telling me
show clearly that things are otherwise?” He crawls up on the back
of the chair, behind my right shoulder, and naps. I do not tell him
that when Eva and her mother and Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam,
there were no dogs or cats. All had been eaten.”][Ms. Schloss's books are Eva's Story: a Survivor's Tale, The Promise: the Story of a Family in the Holocaust, and After Auschwitz (2013). (They sold out before we could buy one when she was here, but I'll remedy that this week.) Interviews with her also formed the basis for James Still's play, They Came for Me.]
[A Guardian review (by Peter Bradshaw) of After Auschwitz called it "extraordinary" and continued:
"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."]
[Part of that work, by chance, included a meeting earlier this month with the Newport High School (Orange County, CA) kids who had been photographed giving Nazi salutes with cups arranged as a swastika. Per The Los Angeles Times, she commented: "I was their age when I realized my life was completely shattered and I would never have a family again. She said the students apologized and said they hadn't meant any harm. She expressed surprise that they could have been unaware of the pain the use of Nazi symbolism could cause, adding, "I hope the school and students have got the message and things will be different."]
[It was, actually, a remarkable weekend for provoking thought on ethnic prejudice and its consequences: Friday evening we met Ron Stallworth, author of the memoir The Black K Klansman; Saturday afternoon when Carolyn Brown spoke, racism wasn't her basic subject, but her biographies of Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker (contemporary writers from Jackson, Mississippi, one of whom was white and the other black) sure teach a lesson on the subject, on which she'd done an interesting discussion a few years ago; then, Sunday, Eva Schloss.]
No comments:
Post a Comment