At the time, in 1940, when the 11-year-old Eva Schloss (then Eva Geiringer), newly arrived from Vienna, played with a group of children that included Anne Frank in the grassy square between their Amsterdam flats after school, she could not have imagined how intimately linked her name and Anne’s would become.
Eva, who has died aged 96, and Anne were not close: although born a month apart and neighbours in Merwedeplein (Anne lived at flat 37 and Eva at 46), they were unalike – Eva athletic, Anne more interested in fashion, films and flirting.
But when Eva’s mother married Otto Frank, Anne’s father, in 1953, she became Anne’s posthumous stepsister, a moniker she never sought but used to brilliant effect in 40 years of Holocaust education. The story she eventually recounted was not of Anne’s death but of her own survival, after being transported to Birkenau (the part of Auschwitz in which the gas chambers were situated) with her parents and brother in 1944.
Eva was born in Vienna into a middle-class Jewish family, the daughter of Elfriede Markovits, known as Fritzi, and Erich Geiringer, a businessman.
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