Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s Stepsister and Auschwitz Survivor, Dies at 96

A Life Forged in History’s Darkest Hour

When the news broke that Eva Schloss had slipped away quietly in London at age 96, the world lost one of its last living links to Anne Frank—and to the moral reckoning of the Holocaust. Friends say she died in her sleep, a book of poetry resting on her nightstand, as if she had simply turned another page.

From Vienna to the Secret Annex

Born Eva Geiringer in 1929, she spent an idyllic early childhood in Vienna’s leafy 19th district, racing her brother Heinz down cobblestone streets while their parents, Erich and Elfriede, ran a small shoe business. The Anschluss shattered that life overnight. By 1938 the family was stateless, scrambling through Belgium and the Netherlands, always one step ahead of the Gestapo. In Amsterdam they met the Franks; Anne and Eva were playmates who traded marbles and whispered secrets on the Merwedeplein playground.

"We were just girls then—girls who didn’t yet know that hiding would become our profession," Schloss recalled in a 2015 interview.

Deportation and the Toll of Survival

Both families were betrayed in 1944. Eva, her mother, and her brother were herded onto the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her father and Heinz perished in the death marches; Eva and Elfriede survived by clinging to a single promise whispered across barbed wire: "If we walk out, we tell."

A Second Family, a Second Silence

Liberation brought no tidy epilogue. In 1953 Elfriede married Otto Frank, welding two shattered clans together. Eva became Anne’s posthumous stepsister, yet for decades she could not speak of the camps. Only after Otto’s death in 1980 did she shoulder his mission, touring schools on five continents, answering questions no textbook dared frame.

Legacy in the Digital Age

Even in her nineties Schloss still logged onto Zoom to testify for classrooms from São Paulo to Seoul. "Memory is not nostalgia," she told a rapt audience in Cape Town last year. "It is a vaccine against indifference." The Eva Schloss Holocaust Education Programme, now headquartered at University College London, will archive more than 2,000 of her recorded talks.

Tributes Pour In

• Holocaust Memorial Museum: "Her courage turned pain into purpose."
• Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis: "A matriarch of remembrance."
• UN Secretary-General: "A beacon for every human-rights curriculum."

She is survived by three children, five grandchildren, and a generation of students who will never forget the moment they met history face-to-face.