By Issy Ronald, CNN
(CNN) — Eva Schloss, who survived the Holocaust as a teenager before becoming Anne Frank’s stepsister and a tireless campaigner against prejudice, has died at age 96, her trust announced Sunday.
“Eva was a remarkable woman: an Auschwitz survivor, a devoted Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for remembrance, understanding and peace,” the Anne Frank Trust UK, which Schloss co-founded, said Sunday.
Such was her impact that Britain’s King Charles III was among those who paid tribute to her.
“My wife and I are greatly saddened to hear of the death of Eva Schloss,” he said in a statement. “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.”
Schloss was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria, a month before Frank, and, like the Franks, her family fled to Amsterdam, the Netherlands to escape the Nazi regime. Their families met in Amsterdam and the two girls would sometimes play together, though Schloss recalled that they were not particularly close.
“I was a tomboy and she was so much more sophisticated,” Schloss told the Guardian in 2013. “We simply didn’t have the same interests.”
Her family went into hiding in 1942 on the same day as the Franks, and they remained concealed for two years until 1944, when someone betrayed them and they were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
Schloss’ father, Erich Geiringer, and her older brother, Heinz, were both murdered there, leaving Eva and her mother, Fritzi, as the sole survivors of their family.
After the war, Fritzi became reacquainted with Otto Frank, Anne’s father, who had lost his wife and two daughters in the Holocaust, and they married, making Schloss the posthumous stepsister of her old friend.
Schloss settled in London where she met her husband, Zvi Schloss, and had three daughters – Jacky, Caroline and Sylvia.
It was only in 1988, after an exhibition dedicated to Anne Frank opened in London, that she began speaking publicly about the trauma she went through at Auschwitz.
“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,” she said, according to the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam. “And then I began to share my experience, to call for changes in the world.”
From then on, Schloss dedicated her life to educating the world about the horrors of the Holocaust. She spoke in schools and universities, wrote three books – “Eva’s Story,” “After Auschwitz” and “The Promise” – and co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK in 1991, which specifically aimed to educate children aged 9 to 15 about the dangers of antisemitism and other forms of prejudice.
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