Jan. 4, 2026
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To our great sorrow, Eva Schloss-Geiringer has passed away on 3 January 2026 at the age of 96 in London. As a girl Eva Geiringer lived on the Merwedeplein in Amsterdam, opposite Anne Frank’s home. Like Anne, Eva and her family had to go into hiding from the Nazis, and after two years spent underground they were tracked down, arrested and deported. Eva survived Auschwitz.
Vienna to Amsterdam
Eva Geiringer was born in Vienna on 11 May 1929. Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933, annexed Austria in March 1938, bringing Jews in that country into immediate danger. After some wanderings, Eva came to live with her parents and brother at Merwedeplein square in Amsterdam in February 1940. There Eva met fellow teenager Anne Frank. Together with other Jewish and non-Jewish children from the neighbourhood they played on the square.
Auschwitz
In 1942 the Geiringer family went into hiding. The summons to Eva’s brother Heinz ‘to work in Germany’ was the immediate reason for this. Two years in hiding followed. The family was discovered through the betrayal of a Dutch nurse, who collaborated with the Nazis. On 11 May 1944, on Eva’s fifteenth birthday, deportation to the Auschwitz extermination camp followed. Harsh, bitter months were to come. Unlike Eva and her mother, Eva’s brother Heinz and father Erich did not survive the Nazi atrocities.
Otto Frank
After the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army on 27 January 1945, Eva and her mother returned to the Netherlands after a lengthy journey, during which they met Otto Frank, who, like them, had survived the horrors of Auschwitz. Otto Frank would play a key role in Eva’s life, as a friend and later as a stepfather. Otto encouraged Eva, and gave her a purpose in life: photography. With Otto’s Leica camera, Eva left for London to study photography. There she met Zvi Schloss, whom she married in 1952. Otto married Eva’s mother, Elfriede Geiringer-Markovits, in 1953, and moved to Basel in Switzerland.
Speaking out
For over 40 years Eva remained silent about her traumatic experiences in Auschwitz. Of this she said:
‘I talked about this for the first time in 1988, when the exhibition dedicated to Anne Frank came to London. I was far from politics, but I realised that the world had not learned any lessons from the events of 1939 to 1945, that wars continued, that persecution, racism, intolerance still existed. And then I began to share my experience, to call for changes in the world.’
Education
Eva travelled the world to share her life story and message. She did so frankly and fearlessly, in schools and universities and inside prisons, often in cooperation with the Anne Frank Trust UK in London. In 1996 Eva took part in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive project to record her memoirs of events during the Holocaust for educational purposes. She also recorded her life story for the Anne Frank House.
In recognition of her achievements Eva was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Civil Law at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle, and the decoration Knight of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. As a gesture of reconciliation with her homeland, Eva’s Austrian citizenship was restored to her in 2021.
Father and brother
Eva chronicled her life story in the book Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale and worked together on the documentary Eva’s Mission. In the book and documentary Eva’s Promise, Eva recounted the promise she made to her father and brother during the gruelling train journey to Auschwitz: to retrieve their paintings and poems that they had hidden under the attic floor of their hiding place. Eva kept her promise and later donated thirty paintings, created by her brother Heinz, to the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam.
Life story
Eva Schloss-Geiringer had a great impact on the Anne Frank House; we could always call on her. In 2017, Eva, then 88 years old, came to Amsterdam at our request to mark Anne Frank’s 88th birthday. In Anne Frank’s former home at Merwedeplein 37-2, across from her own former home at number 46, Eva shared her life story with thirteen 13-year-old students from the Amsterdams Lyceum – the same secondary school she had attended as a girl, together with her brother Heinz. Eva told the pupils about her childhood, going into hiding and deportation to Auschwitz, and the loss of her father and brother. At the request of a pupil, she showed the tattooed number on her arm. It fell silent.
Our dear Eva has passed away, 9 years after the death of her husband Zvi. We wish her daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren and other loved ones every strength with this great loss.
