When the doors opened at 6 p.m. at Melia Nassau Beach resort on February 9 for an evening with 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, a crowd of 400 was expected. Twenty-two hundred showed up.
"They kept streaming in and streaming in," said Rabbi Sholom Bluming, director, Nassau Jewish Community. "They had to open an additional part of the ballroom, then another part, filling it with every chair the hotel owned. The huge number of attendees is a testament of the thirst Bahamians have for stories of inspiration and knowledge about history. Perhaps it's because many people are experiencing difficult challenges in life and hearing Eva's story shed light on her strength and resilience, which in turn gives them hope in their own life to never give up."
Eva Schloss took the audience through a journey that started out with a happy childhood and morphed into a life in hiding with the family living in two different countries; for a short time they were reunited, engulfed in love and warmth.
Any hope that such good fortune would continue was dashed as Jews were increasingly isolated and marked for camps. No longer was it just a matter of going to separate schools or no school at all, or being allowed to enter stores at only certain hours, it was now a struggle just to escape capture. Hiding places got smaller and smaller, eventually becoming hiding places within hiding places. On one night when the Nazis stormed the house where she and her mother were living, they escaped capture by diving through a hole in a tile wall. Luck more than skill saved her life. She recalled the moment of capture and the years that followed, the three-day transport to the camp at Auschwitz, 800 to a cattle car with two slop buckets a day.
"It is so ironic," she said. "I remember many years later they were transporting 40 sheep in a cattle car and everyone was outraged at how inhumane it was. And yet I wondered where was the world when this was happening to human beings?"
She spoke of the indignities.
"They lined us up and went through the selection. It would take about two hours every week as we stood naked." Only a large-brim black hat her mother had given her to make her look older as she dropped her head as low as she could, saved her from being sent to the gas chambers the first time. She was 15 and small, and the Nazis had no use for such a specimen.
The new prisoners were ordered to strip, their clothes tossed away. They endured being sprayed with icy water and deloused. It was freezing. A large heap of clothing stood nearby. They were told to take one garment and that was what they would wear until they wore it out. The work routine was harsh; the starvation even worse.
"Sometimes on a Sunday the soldiers would make a big pot of potatoes and we could smell them. Sometimes they would give us the potato water and we were so hungry for it. Other times they would bring it to us and dump it on the ground and laugh."
The horrors left a scar far deeper than the branding. Even as the war ended and the Russians came in to the camp to free the prisoners, there were cruelties - and confusion. People did not know where to go, who to trust, they had nothing, they did not know where family members were, or even if they were still alive. Only Eva's mother survived, something she learned after she had mourned her death. Her only brother was murdered. So was her father.
But Anne Frank's father, who had possession of his daughter's now famous diary, sought out what was left of Eva's family and entrusted the diary to Eva who had been her best friend in a far happier childhood. For years, she tried to get it published, but no one was interested. "Who would want to read a story of a child?" Till finally, sometime later it was published. Eventually, Eva's mother married Otto Frank, Anne's father, and the two enjoyed a love that to this day Eva calls blessed.
"For many years I did not want to share my own story, and then one day, through an unplanned request from two friends to explain the background of a new Anne Frank exhibition, I opened up. I talked for hours."
It was then she decided to write a book, to go on the road and share her story with the world. In Nassau, she also shared it with more than 700 students from 10 schools who attended a special event the day before the record crowd gathered to hear her story.
"Eva left us with two important lessons from her talk," said Rabbi Bluming. "The first is not to turn a blind eye to the intolerance and genocide that is happening in the world around us today. We must stand up to indifference and not allow injustice to threaten the lives of those who cannot stand for themselves.
"The second message is to find the silver linings even in the darkest moments of life; for in great challenges you can find the strength to overcome it."
There will never be another evening like the one when Eva Schloss spoke to 2,200 people in Nassau, most of whom walked out slowly, stunned, moved, and as one said, "forever changed".

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