Patrick Comerford
Most people of my generation read Anne Frank’s Diary in our teenage years, and I remember how read it over a few days as a 14-year-old during the summer months on the beach in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry, 60 years ago.
Perhaps this explains, in part, why I paid special attention to news reports in recent days of the death of Eva Schloss (formerly Eva Geiringer), a Holocaust survivor, educator and bestselling author, who was a step-sister of Anne Frank and a co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK.
I began this occasional blog series, ‘Tales of the Viennese Jews,’ in November 2019. I last returned to that series almost a year ago (7 February 2025), when I told the stories of Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025), the archetypal ‘wild child’ of the 1960s, of her brave battle for recovery from addiction and against cancer, and of her mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991), a self-styled baroness who resisted the Nazis in Austria. My previous posting in this series had been the story of Max Perutz (18 May 2021).
The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written more than a century and a half ago in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Strauss family’s Jewish identity.
However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of these stories are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.
Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two postings, I decided after a visit to Vienna to re-tell some of these stories through this series, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.
Eva Geiringer was born in Vienna on 11 May 1929 into a middle-class Jewish family, the daughter of Elfriede Markovits, known as Fritzi, and Erich Geiringer, a businessman. The family observed the main Jewish festivals and did not eat pork, but they were not orthodox.
Their lives changed overnight with the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, in 1938. After Eva’s older brother Heinz was beaten up at school because he was Jewish came home blood-soaked, the Geiringer family decided to leave Vienna and moved first to Brussels and then to Amsterdam.
Eva was 11 when the family arrived in Amsterdam in 1940. Anne Frank, who was a month younger, lived with her parents, Otto and Edith Frank, and her sister in the same block of flats in Merwedeplein: Anne lived at flat 37 and Eva at 46. They were not close, nor were they alike – Eva was athletic, while Anne was more interested in fashion, films and flirting.
When the Netherlands fell to the Nazis, they were forced to wear yellow stars. As life got worse, the two families found false papers and went into hiding, moving seven times in two years before ending up in an attic flat with a secret compartment behind a trapdoor.
While the Geiringer family were having breakfast on Eva’s 15th birthday, the Gestapo stormed in and marched them to their headquarters, where they were beaten before being sent from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Eva and her mother were separated from Eva’s father and brother, their heads were shaved and Eva was tattooed with the number A/5272.
Eva later recalled in detail the repeated humiliations, the starvation, the rats, beetles and lice, the brutal beatings, frostbite and diarrhoea, being forced to watch prisoners being hanged, and being forced to carry away dead bodies.
When Eva went to the hospital block in Birkenau with a high fever, she met her cousin from Prague, Minni, a nurse who interceded with Josef Mengele to save Fritzi, who had been selected for the gas chambers. Without Minni, neither Eva nor Fritzi would have survived.
When Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, Eva and Fritzi returned to Amsterdam. There they learned that Eva’s brother Heinz had died in Mauthausen of exhaustion in April, after the forced march from Auschwitz, and that her father had died three days before the end of the war.
Eva returned to school but felt bitter, angry and depressed. Otto Frank, who had learned of the death of his wife Edith and his daughters Anne and Margot, began to get close to Fritzi, especially after the discovery and the publication of Anne’s diary in 1947. When they married in 1953, Otto became Eva’s stepfather and he gave her the Leica camera he had used to photograph Anne and Margot.
At Otto’s suggestion, Eva went to London to take a photography course. There she met Zvi Schloss, a Bavarian-born Israeli citizen. They married in 1952, became the parents of three daughters, and Eva opened an antiques shop in Edgware.
Eva and Fritzi were invited to the opening of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank and the World’ at the Mall Galleries in 1986. The event was chaired by Ken Livingstone, leader of the Greater London Council, who called on Eva to speak. She had never spoken publicly about her experiences before, but went on to speak at events throughout the UK and co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK with Gillian Walnes Perry.
Eva lived with survivor’s guilt in relation to her brother Heinz. In 2016, she spoke in Tralee, Co Kerry, at an International Women’s Day event organised by the Kerry Businesswomen's Association and the Bon Secours Hospital. In 2017, she organised an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London of 30 of his paintings she had retrieved from their hiding place in Amsterdam.
She seldom spoke in public about Anne Frank apart from quoting the her diary where she said ‘I still believe that deep down human beings are good at heart’, commenting: ‘I cannot help remembering that she wrote this before she experienced Auschwitz and Belsen.’ Her books included The Promise (2006) and the bestselling After Auschwitz (2013).
Eva Schloss was appointed MBE for her work with the Anne Frank Trust and other Holocaust charities. She became an Austrian citizen again in 2021. Her mother Fritzi died in 1998 and her husband Zvi died in 2016. Three years ago, she danced with King Charles when he visited the JW3 centre on Finchley Road in December 2022. Eva died on 3 January 2026 and is survived by their daughters, Caroline, Jacky and Sylvia, and five grandchildren.
‘I have worked very, very hard to change people’s attitudes,’ Eva Schloss once told the BBC. ‘Each person you convince not to be racist is a positive.’ She believed that ‘we need to learn to live with each other in harmony, to accept each other for who and what we are. We must learn the lesson that human differences actually enrich our lives. We should not be afraid of people who are different from us, but we need to embrace their faiths and ways of life so that we can give our children and future generations a safer life to live’.
As for Anne Frank, many of the observations in her diary seem so relevant to events playing out today. For example, she wrote: ‘Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way.
‘Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone … Everyone is scared … the end is nowhere in sight.’
When the Jon S Randall Peace Page on Facebook cited this quotation in June 2019, it was labelled ‘fake’ and denied and the page was suspended by Facebook for some time. Snopes, the online fact-check site, researched and investigated the quote, and verified it. Eventually, when the suspension was lifted, Jon S Randall cited another quotation from Anne Frank that was often quoted by Eva Schloss: ‘It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’
May her memory be a blessing, זיכרונה לברכה
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Tales of the Viennese Jews:
1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’
2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean
3, portraits of two imperial court financiers
4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis
5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist
6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle
7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions
8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen
9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’
10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents
11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist
12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna
13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew
14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna
15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship
16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.
17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.
18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.
19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.
20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.
21, Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) and her mother Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991)
22, Eva Geiringer Schloss (1929-2026), step-sister of Anne Frank
