Anne Frank’s stepsister Eva Schloss, Auschwitz survivor and educator, dies at 96

London: Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor, prominent Holocaust educator and stepsister of Anne Frank, has died at the age of 96.

The Anne Frank Trust UK, where Schloss served as honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, the city where she had lived for many years.

King Charles III paid tribute, saying he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who helped co-found the trust to support young people in challenging prejudice and discrimination.

“The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend,” the King said. “Yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding and resilience through her tireless work for the Anne Frank Trust UK and for Holocaust education across the world.”

Meeting Anne Frank in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam

Schloss was born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria, her Jewish family fled to Amsterdam, where she became friends with Anne Frank, who was the same age. Like the Franks, the Geiringers later went into hiding following the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

After two years, the family was betrayed and arrested. Eva and her mother, Fritzi, were deported to Auschwitz, where her father, Erich, and brother, Heinz, were murdered. Eva and her mother survived until the camp was liberated by Soviet forces in 1945.

Following the war, Eva moved to Britain, where she married Zvi Schloss, a German Jewish refugee, and settled in London. In 1953, her mother married Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father and the sole survivor of his immediate family.

Anne Frank herself died aged 15 from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before the war ended.

Breaking decades of silence to become a Holocaust educator

For many years, Schloss remained silent about her experiences, later explaining that trauma had left her withdrawn and unable to speak about the past. “I was silent for years,” she told the Associated Press (AP) in 2004. “First because I wasn’t allowed to speak. Then I repressed it. I was angry with the world.”

Her public role began in 1986, when she spoke at the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London. From then on, she dedicated her life to Holocaust education, addressing schools, prisons and international conferences, and writing several books, including 'Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank'.

The Auschwitz Memorial condoled her death in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Schloss continued campaigning well into her 90s. In 2019, she travelled to California to meet students photographed making Nazi salutes at a school party, and in 2020 she joined efforts urging Facebook to remove Holocaust-denial content.

“We must never forget the terrible consequences of treating people as ‘other’,” she said in 2024. “The only way to achieve this is through education, and the younger we start the better.”

In a statement, her family described her as “a remarkable woman: an Auschwitz survivor, a devoted Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for remembrance, understanding and peace”.

Zvi Schloss died in 2016. Eva Schloss is survived by her three daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

AP