Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor, made a historic appearance as she shared her story to a sold-out Fox Theater on March 12. 

As the audience was settling into their seats, Rabbi Shmuli Schlanger, co-director of the Chabad Jewish Community Center, began the ceremony with a background of the horrendous genocide of the Jewish community during the Nazi regime. 

“Eva shares a story of pain, betrayal, and ultimately survival and optimism,” Schlanger said.

Kern 1180 radio host and moderator, Richard Beene, started the discussion with the recent events that happened in Newport Beach with high school boys and the anti-Semitic remarks they had made. 

Schloss made a special appearance to the kids’ school and conducted a conversation with the boys and their parents.

“I was very very willing to do this especially because I wanted to really know why those students, 16 years old, from a good school would be able to do anything like that,” Schloss explained.

“Knowing that they would offend millions of people all over the country and not just the Jewish people but other people that suffered from the Nazi’s cruelties.”

She let them know that anything that has to do with the Nazis is very terrible. 

They planned to murder, and destroyed, not only six million Jews but gypsies, gays, and blacks. 

She recalled how the Nazis had no remorse for anybody including the one and half million children they murdered. 

Schloss’s story began with a thought-provoking question by Beene. 

He asked if Schloss thinks the world is doing the Holocaust justice by teaching kids about the Holocaust.

In Europe, the Holocaust is part of their curriculum, but Schloss wants the whole world to teach Holocaust education to its students. 

Schloss feels that there is so much to teach on the subject, but the issue is getting educators to actually teach it. 

As a child, she was forced to move out of her hometown of Vienna due to the regime coming into the towns as the began their destruction of Jews. 

According to Schloss, from one day to the next, all of her family’s friends and neighbors had shunned them from their lives. 

“Every student and teacher knew who were Jews. The very next day after the soldiers came in, the atmosphere had changed. All of our friends stood in the street and waved the swastika flag,” Schloss said. 

She shared a story of how her brother came home from school with a bloody nose and wounds on his forehead. The boy told his parents that his classmates did that to him and the teacher watched it happened. 

As the night proceeded, Beene asked about Schloss’s relationship with Anne Frank. 

Schloss and Frank had a friendship that kept them occupied from being involved with the terrible occurrences happening around them.  

“Anne didn’t go to the normal school, she went to a special school. She was known as Ms. Quack Quack in school. She could never stop talking,” Shloss’s joked. 

When the soldiers finally came into the apartment the Schloss family was hiding in, she and her family were sent to the camps. 

Men and women were separated into different camps, therefore, Schloss and her mother went to one camp and her father and brother went to another. 

“I call them containers. It was metal. No windows, there was a tiny slit at the bottom of the door. There were 80 people. We were standing, not sitting the whole trip. There were two buckets, one for clean water and the other for the restroom,” Schloss said. 

Schloss and her mother were liberated but unfortunately, her father and brother were killed seven days before Auschwitz was liberated. 

Schloss realized that it was necessary to tell the world her story, so she began her journey to spread her story. 

Mayor Karen Gogh presented Schloss with a proclamation stating that March 12 is Holocaust Education Day.

Schloss lives by the idea of learning from the past, living in the present, and looking to the future.