Eva Schloss

Anne Frank’s shy childhood friend who survived Auschwitz and later ‘spoke for millions of victims of hate’

- Patrick Kidd

In June 2019 a painting was auctioned in aid of the Anne Frank Trust that showed a young Jewish girl with dreams of being a writer in the attic where her family hid from the Nazis.

In a mirror, an old woman smiles at her, a vision of a future she never had. The girl was Anne Frank, who would have turned 90 on the day the painting was sold. The face of her older self was the imagination of the artist, but the hands were real, modelled on those of a childhood friend.

Eva Schloss, born Geiringer, had also gone into hiding in Amsterdam, been betrayed and sent to a concentration camp. She survived, with her mother, Fritzi, who later married Anne’s father. While her stepsister’s experience became known to millions through the publication of her diary, Schloss kept the memories that haunted her a secret for 40 years. She told her grandchildren that the tattoo on her arm, given in Auschwitz, had been her phone number.