Anne Frank’s step-sister, Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, dies

Eva Schloss passed away at age 96. Photo / Chris Jackson, Pool, AFP

Eva Schloss, the Auschwitz survivor who dedicated decades to educating people on the Holocaust and the stepsister of diarist Anne Frank, has died aged 96, her foundation announced on Sunday.

Her family expressed their “great sadness” at the loss of this “remarkable woman: an Auschwitz survivor, a devoted Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for remembrance, understanding and peace”.

King Charles III, who danced with Schloss at an event in London in 2022, and his wife, Camilla, patron of her Anne Frank Trust UK foundation, said they were “greatly saddened”.

“We are both privileged and proud to have known her and we admired her deeply,” the royal couple said in a statement.

Schloss co-founded the organisation in 1990 to pass on the memory of the Holocaust to young people and combat prejudice.

Born Eva Geiringer in Austria in 1929, she was a child when the Nazis annexed her country.

Her Jewish family first fled to Belgium and then to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where they settled opposite Frank’s house.

Frank’s accounts of the Holocaust in the diary have become a symbol of the suffering inflicted by the Nazis during World War II.

The two girls were the same age and often played together.

But from 1942 onwards, both families had to go into hiding.

Eva, her mother, Elfriede, her father, Erich, and her brother, Heinz, were betrayed two years later by a Nazi sympathiser. They were arrested on her 15th birthday and sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp in May 1944.

Eva, who was able to stay in touch with her mother, was separated from her father and brother, who both died in the camps.

Shortly after their liberation in 1945, she moved to London to study and met her future husband, Zvi Schloss.

Her mother returned to Amsterdam and married Frank’s father, Otto, who was also a widower upon his return from Auschwitz.

Eva Schloss with Queen Camilla. Photo / Getty Images

Eva and Zvi Schloss, who had three daughters, obtained British citizenship. Eva Schloss also regained her Austrian citizenship in 2021, aged 92.

She wrote several books and recounted her experiences around the world, and was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by the King in 2013, when he was Prince of Wales.

Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

-Agence France-Presse