It was more than 60 years ago, but Eva Schloss can still remember the day she realized her normal life as a Jewish girl would never be the same.

"I was 9 years old at the time and I went to a friend's house - she was a Christian," Schloss said to a small group of MSU students and faculty Wednesday afternoon. "Her mother opens the door and she said, 'You're not welcome here anymore,' and slammed the door in my face."

Confused, the young Schloss went home and began to understand what the spreading Nazi influence in her home country would come to mean.

"We as children really didn't know much about it," she said. "Our parents kept it away from us."

During the speech, which was sponsored by the MSU Jewish Studies program, she said her parents tried to maintain a sense of normality while anti-Semitism came into acceptance in Austria.

But she said by 1942, the family had split up and gone into hiding in Belgium and Holland.

"It was bad, but nothing compared to what would happen later," she said.

It was while in Holland that Schloss met a young Jewish girl who would later become the face and name attached to victims of the Holocaust - Anne Frank.

"She was just one of our playmates," Schloss said. "She was perhaps a little bit more mature. She was interested in boys."

After two years of switching hiding places in Holland, a double agent posing as a nurse revealed the Schloss' location and they were sent to concentration camps.

Schloss and her mother went to Auschwitz concentration camp, which she called the "quickest change from relative normality to hell on Earth."

While in the camp, Schloss saw people dying of hunger and exhaustion while living in constant fear that one day it would be her turn to go the gas chamber or be used in human experiments.

There was no toilet paper and cold showers were allowed once a week. People ate a slushy mixture of "whatever was available" for breakfast and a chunk of plain bread for dinner.

"If you gave up for one minute, people knew you were going to die," Schloss said. "Then one day we woke up and the Germans had gone."

The prisoners in the camp were alone and unsure what to do.

Schloss said she remembers stacking the bodies of people who died after the camp was abandoned by the Nazis.

"We didn't know what would happen," she said.

Russian troops liberated the concentration camp 10 days later.

Although Schloss and her mother survived the camp, news of her brother and father was grim. Both died just days before their camp had been liberated.

After World War II, her mother married Anne Frank's father, Otto, whose daughter's diaries became the acclaimed book "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl."

Dietetics senior Glee Van Loon said she was fascinated to hear what happened after Anne Frank's diaries stopped.

"If there was anything positive in it, I want to hear it," she said. "I also have some Jewish relatives in my family. That makes it all the more interesting."