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How Anne Frank's stepsister Eva Schloss reduced Wormwood Scrubs prisoners to tears with her story

One inmate says: 'I got chills... It got me welled up, particularly when I think about my own daughter'

December 11, 2014 11:35
Attention: Inmates sat in silence for two hours as Eva Schloss spoke at Wormwood Scrubs
4 min read

Inside a 19th-century chapel, flanked by high-security walls, sat row upon row of hardened criminals.

Ninety of them, clad in regulation grey track-suits, waited for the most unlikely of guests to a high-security prison - an 85-year-old, 5ft 2in woman dressed daintily in cardigan, trouser-suit and shoulder-bag.

For the next two hours, the Wormwood Scrubs inmates sat tall, hands clasped often at their chest while not one of them spoke as Eva Schloss described in vivid detail how her family was betrayed, captured by the Nazis, and suffered at the hands of sadistic guards at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp.

There was no sound other than the occasional gasp or a discreet shuffle as someone moved uncomfortably in his seat. And a tear would be wiped away as Eva spoke calmly of the time she was tortured and made to strip naked in front of male guards.

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