Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and a tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96.
The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was an honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, where she had lived.
Schloss’ family remembered her as “a remarkable woman: an Auschwitz survivor, a devoted Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for remembrance, understanding and peace.”
“We hope her legacy will continue to inspire through the books, films and resources she leaves behind,” the family said in a statement.
Jae C. Hong / AP
Born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, Schloss fled with her family to Amsterdam after Nazi Germany annexed 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, Eva’s family spent two years in hiding to avoid capture after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. They were eventually betrayed, arrested and sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
“Eighty people were pushed in there and there were two buckets — one with water, one to use as toilets,” Schloss recalled in 2019 to CBS Minnesota about Auschwitz. “Once a day, they threw big chunks of bread in, like you would feed wild animals.”
“It lives with me all the time. All the time,” she added.
Schloss and her mother, Fritzi, survived until the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. Her father, Erich, and brother Heinz died in Auschwitz.
After the war, Eva moved to Britain, married German Jewish refugee Zvi Schloss and settled in London.
In 1953, her mother married Frank’s father, Otto, the only member of his immediate family to survive. Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, months before the end of the war.
Schloss did not speak publicly about her experiences for decades, later saying that wartime trauma had made her withdrawn and unable to connect with others.
After she addressed the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London in 1986, Schloss made it her mission to educate younger generations about the Nazi genocide.
“We said, ‘Never again, Auschwitz.’ We have learned our lesson,” Schloss told CBS Minnesota. “The Germans were not all for Hitler, but they were bystanders and that is what I tell people they shouldn’t be.”
Over the following decades, she spoke in schools and prisons, at international conferences and told her story in books, including “Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.”
She kept campaigning into her 90s. In 2019, she traveled to Newport Beach, California to meet teenagers who were photographed making Nazi salutes at a high school party. The following year she was part of a campaign urging Facebook to remove Holocaust-denying material from the social networking site.
“People should never, ever forget what has happened and how it came about,” Schloss told reporters after the closed-door meeting with students, according to CBS Los Angeles. “I was shocked that in 2019 – in a well-educated town, in a very highly educated school – that incidents like this should still happen.”
Britain’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who co-founded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice.
“The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and 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,” the king said.
Zvi Schloss died in 2016. Eva Schloss is survived by their three daughters, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.