Eva Schloss, step-sister of Anne Frank, speaks in O.C., just days after students posed with swastika
Eva Schloss says immortality was her step-sister Anne Frank’s biggest wish.
“She has succeeded, because wherever I go in the world, people know her as the girl who was murdered by the Nazis,” Schloss, 89, said during her Wednesday visit to Chapman University in Orange.
Although Anne would not see her 16th birthday, her story lives on through her diary, which is mandatory reading for schoolchildren around the world.
Schloss, who now lives in London, shared stories about living in silence with the Dutch resistance in Amsterdam and being told by her captors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp to forget her name and respond only to the number tattooed on her arm.
In 1938, the Schlosses moved to the Netherlands from Vienna, following the Nazi invasion of Austria. Schloss met Anne in the town square outside their shared apartment block in Amsterdam. She fondly remembers playing marbles and hopscotch with her.
Although Schloss and her mother, Elfriede, were freed from the death camps by Soviet soldiers, they would learn that her father and brother did not survive.
After returning to Amsterdam they reunited with Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the sole member of his family to survive, and, in 1953, Elfriede married him.
Janet Halpert of Irvine was among those in the nearly full auditorium at Chapman. She was told her aunt attended a Montessori School with Anne and was hoping to learn more about her family’s connection with the Franks.
“It’s important that we wake up and know how to be more human and recognize that everyone is created in the image of God,” Halpert said.
For 40 years, Schloss didn’t even talk about her Holocaust experience with her husband and children. Stories she heard in 1986 of Vietnamese citizens fleeing their country motivated her to speak up.
Before Schloss arrived in Orange, Rabbi Reuven Mintz of Newport Beach’s Chabad Center for Jewish Life asked for her help responding to a viral Internet crisis enveloping Costa Mesa and Newport Beach teenagers who had posted images of themselves saluting a swastika fashioned from red Solo cups.
A torrent of criticism followed when the images went global. In an event that was coordinated and arranged by the Chabad at Chapman University, Schloss agreed to Mintz’ invitation to counsel the students the morning after her speech at Chapman.
“When I heard about this incident I was shocked that in 2019, in a well-educated town, in a very well-educated school, that incidents like this could still happen,” Schloss said, “and was very keen and willing to come speak and hear from the children themselves about why they were able to do anything like that that’s so hurtful to millions of other people.”
She added that the incident, as well as the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, underscores the importance of Holocaust education.
Daniel Langhorne is a contributor to Times Community News.
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