Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor, Holocaust educator, and the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank, has died at the age of 96.
The Anne Frank Trust UK announced that Schloss passed away Saturday in London, where she had lived for decades. Schloss served as the trust’s honorary president and dedicated much of her life to educating young people about the dangers of hatred and prejudice.
King Charles III paid tribute to Schloss, saying he was “privileged and proud” to have known her.
“The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend,” the king said, “and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding and resilience.”
Born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, Schloss fled to Amsterdam with her family after Nazi Germany annexed Austria. There, she became friends with another Jewish girl her age — Anne Frank — years before Frank’s diary would become one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust.
Like the Frank family, Eva and her relatives went into hiding after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. After two years, they were betrayed, arrested, and deported to the Auschwitz death camp. Eva and her mother, Fritzi, survived until liberation by Soviet troops in 1945. Her father, Erich, and her brother, Heinz, were murdered there.
After the war, Schloss moved to Britain, where she married German Jewish refugee Zvi Schloss and built a new life in London. In 1953, her mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank — the only member of Anne’s immediate family to survive the Holocaust. Anne Frank died at just 15 years old from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, months before the war ended.
For many years, Schloss rarely spoke about her trauma, later explaining that the experience left her angry and withdrawn.
“I was silent for years,” she told The Associated Press in 2004. “First because I wasn’t allowed to speak. Then I repressed it. I was angry with the world.”
That changed in 1986 after she spoke at the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London. From that point on, Schloss made it her life’s mission to educate younger generations about the Holocaust. She spoke at schools, prisons, and international conferences and authored several books, including Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.
Even into her 90s, Schloss continued her advocacy. In 2019, she traveled to California to meet teenagers photographed making Nazi salutes at a high school party. The following year, she joined efforts urging Facebook to remove Holocaust-denying content from its platform.
“We must never forget the terrible consequences of treating people as ‘other,’” Schloss said in 2024. “The only way to achieve this is through education, and the younger we start the better.”
Her family remembered her as “a remarkable woman” whose legacy will live on through her books, films, and educational work.
Zvi Schloss died in 2016. Eva Schloss is survived by her three daughters, along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.