On the day she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Eva Geiringer Schloss' fate was decided by the coat she was wearing.
Guards sorted new prisoners at the concentration camp into those who faced a life of hard labor and unspeakable horrors, and others -- too old, young or weak -- who went to the gas chambers.
Schloss was captured on her 15th birthday. Were it not for a coat that made her look older, she would have been killed immediately.
Yesterday, Schloss calmly looked out into an audience of high school students at St. Catherine's School in Richmond. "Most of you would not have passed through," she told them.
Schloss is in town this week to participate in the staging of James Still's play "And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank" by Ampersand, an organization of St. Christopher's and St. Catherine's schools.
Rusty Wilson, chairman of the theater department at St. Christopher's, and Schloss became friends nearly a decade ago when he was directing the play in Idaho.
The 70-minute play is written for middle and high school students to help them understand the Holocaust, Wilson said. "It doesn't pull any punches," he said. "It is presented in a clear, honest way."
Schloss' life was intertwined with young diarist Anne Frank's. They were friends and neighbors in Amsterdam, where both families moved to avoid the Nazi persecution of Jews.
Both were discovered hiding and sent to concentration camps. Schloss survived. Frank did not.
In 1953, Schloss' mother, Fritzi, married Frank's father, Otto.
Schloss, 79, did not speak about the camp until 1986.
"At first I wanted to speak, but the world didn't want to know," she said. "There was a terrible guilt feeling of, 'Why didn't we do anything?'"
In 1995, Schloss returned to Auschwitz. "It was a terrible experience," she said. "But one nice thing was that some of the Russian officers who had liberated the camp were there. I got to hug them, to thank them."
The London resident now travels extensively, knowing that most camp survivors don't have much longer to tell the stories that may be lost.
She goes to hundreds of schools a year. "I go as well a lot into prisons because it is very important to give them hope that there is life afterwards," said Schloss, who speaks with a German accent.
She is not bitter about her experiences.
"This was Otto Frank who helped me a lot. Although he had lost everything, he was not filled with hate," she said. "You can't go through life hating.
"But I haven't forgiven those Nazis, the perpetrators. Those were not people like I imagined a human being to act."
She doesn't flinch at the play's bleak stage set, with swastika banners and barbed wire.
"No, what shocks me always is pictures of this mass gathering and then how they all get carried away. And this is the danger of brainwashing," Schloss said.
"And this is in the play very easily explained, about how the Hitler Youth are so easily trained to just have no feelings and just do what they're told to do. And this is what happens now in the world, that people are trained to hate those people they have to kill.
"I think if you can brainwash people to hate, why can't we influence them to love?"
Contact Lisa Crutchfield at (804) 649-6362 or lcrutchfield@timesdispatch.com.
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