Eva Schloss, Holocaust survivor and half-sister of Anne Frank, dies at 96

Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor, half-sister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and tireless educator of the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96 years old.

The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died Saturday in London, where she lived.

King Charles said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, co-founder of the charity aimed at helping young people fight prejudice.

“The horrors she endured as a young woman are impossible to understand and yet she dedicated 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,” the king said.

Born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, Schloss fled with her family to Amsterdam after Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. She became friends with another Jewish girl of the same age, Anne Frank, whose diary would become one of the most famous chronicles of the Holocaust.

Like the Franks, the Schloss family spent two years in hiding to avoid capture after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. They were eventually betrayed, arrested and sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Schloss and his mother, Fritzi, survived until the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. His father, Erich, and brother Heinz died at Auschwitz.

After the war, she moved to Britain, married German Jewish refugee Zvi Schloss, and settled in London.

In 1953, his mother married Frank’s father, Otto, the only surviving member of his immediate family. Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, a few months before the end of the war.

“I was angry at the world”

Schloss did not speak publicly about her experiences for decades, later saying that the trauma of war left her withdrawn and unable to connect with others.

“I kept silent for years, first because I wasn’t allowed to speak. Then I suppressed it. I was angry at the world,” she told the Associated Press in 2004.

But after giving a speech at the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London in 1986, Schloss made it his mission to educate younger generations about the Nazi genocide. Over the next decades, she spoke in schools and prisons, at international conferences, and told her story in books, including Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Account by Anne Frank’s Half-Sister.

She continued to campaign well into her 90s. In 2019, she traveled to Newport Beach, California, to meet teenagers photographed giving the Nazi salute at a high school party. The following year, she participated in a campaign urging Facebook to remove any Holocaust-denying content from the social networking site.

“We must never forget the terrible consequences of treating people as ‘others,'” Schloss said in 2024. “We must respect each other’s races and religions. We must live together with our differences. The only way to do that is through education, and the younger we start, the better.”

Schloss’s family remembers her as “a remarkable woman: a survivor of Auschwitz, a dedicated Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for memory, understanding and peace.”

“We hope her legacy continues to be an inspiration through the books, films and resources she leaves behind,” the family said. said in a statement.

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