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Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s tragic stepmother and tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. He was 96 years old.
The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, where she lived.
King Charles said he was “privileged and proud” to know Schloss, who founded a charity to help young people challenge racism.
“The horrors she endured as a girl are impossible to fathom but she dedicated her whole life to defeating hatred and prejudice, encouraging kindness, courage, understanding and resilience through her tireless work at the Anne Frank Trust UK and Holocaust education around the world,” said King.
Born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, Schloss fled with her family to Amsterdam after Nazi Germany occupied Austria. He befriended another Jewish girl of the same age, Anne Frank, whose diary would become one of the most famous histories of the Holocaust.
Like the Franks, the Schloss family spent two years in hiding to avoid capture after the Nazis took over the Netherlands. They were eventually betrayed, arrested and sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
Schloss and his mother, Fritzi, survived until the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. His father, Erich, and his brother Heinz died in 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 family. Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, months before the end of the war.
‘I was angry with the world’
Schloss did not speak publicly about his experiences for decades, later saying that wartime trauma had made him withdrawn and unable to communicate with others.
“I was silent for years, first because I wasn’t allowed to speak. Then I suppressed it. I was angry at the world,” he told the Associated Press in 2004.
But after she spoke at the opening of the Anne Frank exhibition in London in 1986, Schloss made it her mission to educate younger generations about the Nazi genocide. In the following decades he spoke at schools and prisons, at international conferences and told his story in books including The Story of Eva: The Legend of the Savior by Anne Frank’s Sister.
He continued to campaign well into his 90s. In 2019, he went to Newport Beach, Calif., to meet teenagers who were photographed making Nazi salutes at a high school event. The following year he was part of a campaign urging Facebook to remove Holocaust denial from the social media site.
“We must never forget the negative consequences of treating people as ‘others,'” Schloss said in 2024. “We need to respect everyone’s races and religions. We need to live together despite our differences. The only way to achieve this is education, and we start better with the young.”
Schloss’s family remembered her as “a remarkable woman: a survivor of Auschwitz, a teacher devoted to the Holocaust, tireless in her work of remembrance, understanding and peace.”
“We hope that his legacy will continue to inspire through the books, films and resources he left behind,” the family said in a statement.
Zvi Schloss died in 2016. Eva Schloss is survived by their three daughters, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
