Eva Schloss, the stepsister of diarist Anne Frank, has died aged 96.
King Charles said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Mrs Schloss, who co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK in 1990.
The trust aims to help young people challenge antisemitism and all forms of prejudice through learning from Anne Frank and the Holocaust.
The King, who danced with Mrs Schloss at a Jewish community centre in north London in 2022, said he and the Queen “admired her deeply”.
Mrs Schloss, the honorary president of the Anne Frank Trust UK, devoted much of her life to speaking in schools, prisons and on other international platforms.
She was made an MBE in 2012 for her services educating people on the perils of prejudice and intolerance.
Her death was confirmed in a tribute to the Jewish News, in which her family spoke of their “great sadness” at the loss of “our dear mother, grandmother and great-grandmother”.
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They remembered her as “a remarkable woman: an Auschwitz survivor, a devoted Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for remembrance, understanding and peace”.
The King said in a statement: “My wife and I are greatly saddened to hear of the death of Eva Schloss.
“The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding and resilience through her tireless work for the Anne Frank Trust UK and for Holocaust education across the world.
“We are both privileged and proud to have known her and we admired her deeply. May her memory be a blessing to us all.”
Mrs Schloss, an Austrian Jew, was a teenager when the Nazis invaded, and she left Germany with her family for Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where she became friendly with a young Anne Frank.
Anne Frank would posthumously achieve worldwide fame with her diary, published after the war.
Due to the worsening situation in the Netherlands, Eva and her family – mother Fritzi, father Erich and brother Heinz – moved from house to house for two years.
They were eventually betrayed by a Nazi sympathiser, who took them in, only to give them up.
On her 15th birthday they were arrested, brutally interrogated and, in May 1944, forced on to trains to Auschwitz, where Eva and her mother were separated from her father and brother.
She would never see her brother again and, although she saw her father briefly several times, after liberation she learned both had died.
She later moved to London, where she met and married Zvi Schloss. A year later her mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto.
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Paying tribute, her family said: “We hope her legacy will continue to inspire through the books, films and resources she leaves behind.
“We are incredibly proud of all that Eva stood for and accomplished, but right now, we are grieving.
“We kindly ask the media and the public to respect our privacy during this difficult time.
“We hope to hold a memorial event at a later date, and will share further details in due course. We thank everyone for the love and respect shown to Eva over the years.”
