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

Eva Schloss, the Auschwitz survivor who spent decades educating younger generations about the Holocaust and later became the stepsister of diarist Anne Frank, has died aged 96, her foundation has said.

The Anne Frank Trust UK, where Schloss served as honorary president, said on Sunday that she died a day earlier in London, the city she had called home for most of her adult life.

Schloss was widely known not only for surviving one of history’s darkest chapters, but for choosing to spend the rest of her life speaking about it, long after many others could no longer bear to.

King Charles III paid tribute, saying he was “privileged and proud” to have known her.

“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.

The European Jewish Congress said it was “deeply saddened” by Schloss’s death, calling her a “powerful voice” for Holocaust remembrance and education.

Born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, Schloss fled with her family to Amsterdam after Nazi Germany annexed Austria. There, she became friends with another Jewish girl her age, Anne Frank, whose diary would later become one of the most enduring testimonies of the Holocaust.

Like the Franks, Eva’s family went into hiding after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. After two years, they were betrayed, arrested and deported to the Auschwitz death camp.

Schloss and her mother, Fritzi, survived until the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. Her father, Erich, and her brother, Heinz, were murdered at Auschwitz.

After the war, Eva moved to the United Kingdom, married German-Jewish refugee Zvi Schloss, and settled in London. In 1953, her mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust, making Eva Anne Frank’s stepsister.

Anne Frank herself died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, just months before the war ended.

For many years, Schloss did not speak publicly about what she had endured. She later said the trauma left her withdrawn and unable to relate to others.

That silence eventually broke in 1986, when Schloss spoke at the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London. From that moment on, she made Holocaust education her life’s work.

Eva Schloss is survived by her three daughters, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.