Anne Frank’s stepsister called for tolerance as she discussed the horrors of Auschwitz 75 years after its liberation.
Eva Schloss and her family abandoned their ‘beautiful life’ in Vienna and fled to Amsterdam after the city fell to Nazi occupation.
There they befriended Otto Frank and his daughter Anne before both families went into hiding in 1942.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Eva described how she was arrested two years later on her 15th birthday and the family was deported to the infamous concentration camp in Poland.
She said she couldn’t talk about her experiences there for 40 years ‘because the world didn’t want to know’.
But she now shares her story as well as that of Anne’s life to educate younger generations about the dangers of hate and prejudice.
Asked specifically about the ‘rising tide of anti-Semitism’, Eva said: ‘I must say I’m not in the least worried.
‘Anti-Semitism is nothing new. We have been persecuted since forever-ever.
‘And it’s not just Jewish people who are discriminated against. Its Muslims and Christians as well – just people who are not the same as you.
‘I think the more fuss you make about it, the more attention you draw to it.’
She said religion was supposed to be ‘something beautiful’, adding: ‘I still can’t understand why there is so much discrimination against people, especially for religious reasons.
‘We should let everybody worship who they want without the danger of being killed or persecuted.’
Earlier she described stepping off the Holocaust train to be confronted by the ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele, the SS officer and physician infamous for his deadly human experiments on prisoners.
Eva recalled: ‘My mother was selected by Mengele to be gassed. We had to get naked in front of him, and if he thought we were too thin and couldn’t work anymore then we would have to go to the other side.’
The heart-breaking news was a ‘very, very big blow’ to her father, who did not make it out alive and spent the last months of his life in the camp thinking his wife had been killed.
But by some ‘miracle’ Eva’s mother, Elfriede, escaped the gas chamber and the two found each other again after the camp was liberated by the Russians in January 1945.
Thereafter they spent ‘many, many months’ travelling east, ending up in Odessa before eventually returning to Amsterdam where they were reunited with Otto Frank.
He and her mother later married in 1953, but it wasn’t until after Otto’s death in 1980 that Eva spoke about her experiences of the Holocaust and took up the mantle of preserving his daughter’s memory.
She said: ‘For 40 years I didn’t speak because the world didn’t really want to know, and so I had nightmares – it must have affected me, of course.
‘As soon as I was speaking this all went.’
She told GMB that her book ‘Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the step-sister of Anne Frank’, published in 2010 made her ‘feel free again’.
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