The Promise

Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss retells her own story specially for younger readers.

This is the remarkable true story of a young Jewish girl and her brother caught in a world turned upside down by the Nazis during the Second World War. Eva Schloss describes her happy early childhood in Vienna with her kind and loving parents and her older brother Heinz, whom she adored. But when the Nazis marched into Austria everything changed.

Eva's family fled to Belgium, then to Amsterdam where, with the help of the Dutch Resistance, they spent the next two years in hiding - Eva and her mother in one house, and her father and brother in another. But in the end they were all betrayed and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Despite the horrors of the camp, Eva's positive attitude and stubborn personality (which had often got her into trouble) saw her through one of the most tragic events in history but sadly her father and brother perished just weeks before the liberation. Eva and her mother travelled back to the house in Amsterdam where Heinz and his father had hidden. There they found over thirty beautiful paintings by her brother. For Eva, here was a tangible, everlasting memory of her beloved older brother, and a reminder of her father's promise that all the good things you accomplish will make a difference.

Heinz's paintings have been on display in exhibitions in the USA and are now a part of a permanent exhibition in Amsterdam's war museum.

Eva Schloss is the posthumous step-sister of Anne Frank, after her mother was remarried to Otto Frank, the only surviving member of his immediate family.