Top Photo: Eva Schloss during her oral history interview in 2008. The National WWII Museum

The National WWII Museum mourns the loss of Eva Schloss, Auschwitz survivor and posthumous stepsister of Anne Frank, who passed away on Saturday, January 3. She was 96 years old.

Schloss’s death was announced by the Anne Frank Trust UK, a Holocaust and anti-prejudice education organization she co-founded and served as honorary president of.

“Eva was a remarkable woman: an Auschwitz survivor, a devoted Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for remembrance, understanding and peace,” her family said in a statement posted on the organization’s website.

Schloss (née Geiringer) was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, in 1929. In 1938, after Adolf Hitler annexed Austria, the Geiringer family relocated to the Netherlands to escape Nazi persecution. Settling in Amsterdam, the family became neighbors with the Frank family—Otto, Edith, and their daughters, Margot and Anne. Eva and Anne were the same age and played together often. In July 1942, Eva’s family was forced into hiding after her older brother, Heinz, received orders to report to a German work camp. The family was separated, Eva with their mother, Fritzi, and Heinz with their father, Erich, with few reunions.

In May 1944, on Eva’s 15th birthday, the Geiringer family was captured after being betrayed by a Nazi sympathizer in the Dutch Underground. The family was sent to Auschwitz, where Eva experienced horrors that left her physically and spiritually devastated. 

“The fear of dying was, of course, every day with us,” Schloss recounted in her oral history interview with The National WWII Museum. 

When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945, Eva and her mother were among the around 7,000 ill or dying prisoners left at the camp after SS evacuated. Before the camp was liberated, SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners, including Eva’s brother and father, to march west in what became known as the death marches. Eva later learned from the Red Cross that her brother and father survived the death march to the Mauthausen concentration camp, but both perished just days before that camp was liberated.

In 1951, Eva moved to England, where she met and married Zvi Schloss. The couple settled in London and had three daughters. In 1953, her mother, Fritzi, married Otto Frank, the only survivor of the Secret Annex.

Schloss dedicated her life to Holocaust education and sharing her story with audiences around the world. She was the author of three books: Eva’s Story, The Promise, and After Auschwitz. In 1990, Schloss co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK to empower young people to “challenge all forms of prejudice through learning from Anne Frank and the Holocaust.”

“We must never forget the terrible consequences of treating people as ‘other,’” Schloss said in 2024. “We need to respect everybody’s races and religions. We need to live together with our differences. The only way to achieve this is through education, and the younger we start the better.”

In 2008, Schloss recounted her experiences as a Holocaust survivor during a public presentation at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, and her story is featured in the Museum’s Liberation Pavilion. We are also proud to have her oral history in our Digital Collections. 

We are grateful for Ms. Schloss’s service and friendship, and our thoughts are with her family.