Eva Schloss spent decades in silence before finding her voice. The Auschwitz survivor, who became the stepsister of Anne Frank after the war, died this week at 96, leaving behind a legacy built on the conviction that education could dismantle hatred.
Schloss and her family fled Austria for Amsterdam when Nazi Germany annexed their homeland. She was a teenager when she met Anne Frank, another Jewish girl her age. Both families went into hiding after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, but both were eventually betrayed. Schloss and her mother Fritzi survived Auschwitz until Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945. Her father Erich and brother Heinz did not.
After the war, Schloss moved to Britain, married Zvi Schloss, and tried to move forward. In 1953, her mother married Otto Frank, Anne's father and the only member of his immediate family to survive. Anne had died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just months before liberation, at 15.
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Start Your News DetoxFor years, Schloss said nothing about what she had endured. The trauma had made her withdrawn, unable to connect. "I was silent for years, first because I wasn't allowed to speak. Then I repressed it. I was angry with the world," she told the Associated Press in 2004.
But in 1986, when she was asked to speak at the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London, something shifted. She decided that silence was no longer an option. Over the following decades, Schloss became a fixture in schools and prisons, at international conferences, in books and documentaries. She told her story not as a victim, but as a witness—someone with a responsibility to the next generation.
She kept going into her 90s. In 2019, at 91, she traveled to California to meet teenagers who had been photographed making Nazi salutes at a high school party. The following year, she campaigned for Facebook to remove Holocaust-denying content from its platform. Her message never wavered: "We must never forget the terrible consequences of treating people as 'other.' We need to respect everybody's races and religions. The only way to achieve this is through education, and the younger we start the better."
King Charles III said he was "privileged and proud" to have known her. Schloss had co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK, an organization dedicated to helping young people challenge prejudice. Her family described her as "a remarkable woman," devoted not just to remembrance, but to the harder work of building understanding and peace.
She is survived by three daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The books, films, and educational resources she created will continue to reach students who have never lived in a world where she walked into a classroom.
