Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor and the posthumous stepsister of Anne Frank, died Saturday in London at the age of 96, the Anne Frank House confirmed. Her passing marks the loss of one of the last and most significant living witnesses to the Nazi death camps. Beyond her survival, Schloss was a tireless advocate against racism, intolerance and hatred.
Britain’s King Charles paid tribute, saying he and Queen Camilla were “greatly saddened” by her death. “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,” he said. “We are both privileged and proud to have known her and we admired her deeply. May her memory be a blessing to us all.”
Born in Vienna in May 1929, Schloss fled Austria after Hitler’s annexation in 1938 and arrived with her family in Amsterdam in 1940. They lived near the Frank family, and Eva and Anne played together as children, unaware of the tragic way their lives would later intersect.
In 1942, after her brother Heinz received a summons to work in Germany and was later murdered, the Geiringer family went into hiding. They were betrayed two years later by a Dutch collaborator. On May 11, 1944—Eva’s 15th birthday—she and her family were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Eva and her mother survived, but her father Erich and brother Heinz were murdered in the camps.
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Eva Schloss with British actress Joanna Lumley in 2022
(Photo: Chris Jackson / POOL / AF)
After Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, Eva returned to the Netherlands, where she met Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only surviving member of his immediate family. In 1953, he married Eva’s mother, Elfriede, making him Eva’s stepfather. Otto encouraged Eva to pursue photography, a path that eventually led her to London and a new life.
According to the Daily Mail, Schloss remained silent about her wartime experiences for over 40 years. “I talked about this for the first time in 1988, when the exhibition dedicated to Anne Frank came to London,” she later explained. “I was far from politics, but I realized that the world had not learned any lessons from the events of 1939 to 1945, that wars continued, that persecution, racism, intolerance still existed. And then I began to share my experience, to call for changes in the world.”
From that moment on, Schloss devoted herself to education, speaking at schools, universities and prisons around the world. She fulfilled a promise made to her father and brother to preserve their creative work, later donating Heinz’s paintings to Amsterdam’s Dutch Resistance Museum.
Schloss continued supporting the Anne Frank House throughout her life. In 2017, at age 88, she returned to her childhood home to speak with students, even showing them the camp number tattooed on her arm.
Schloss died nine years after her husband Zvi. She is survived by daughters, grandchildren and extended family.