Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, stepsister of Anne Frank, dies at 96

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Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, stepsister of Anne Frank, dies at 96

2026-01-05 18:14 Last Updated At：18:20

LONDON (AP) — Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and a tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96.

The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died Saturday in London, where she lived.

Britain’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who co-founded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice.

“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,” the king said.

Born Eva Geiringer in Vienna in 1929, Schloss fled with her family to Amsterdam after Nazi Germany annexed Austria. She became friends with another Jewish girl of the same age, Anne Frank, whose diary would become one of the most famous chronicles of the Holocaust.

Like the Franks, Eva's family spent two years in hiding to avoid capture after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. They were eventually betrayed, arrested and sent to the Auschwitz death camp.

Schloss and her mother Fritzi survived until the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945. Her father Erich and brother Heinz died in Auschwitz.

After the war, Eva moved to Britain, married German Jewish refugee Zvi Schloss and settled in London.

In 1953, her mother married Frank’s father, Otto, the only member of his immediate family to survive. Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, months before the end of the war.

Schloss did not speak publicly about her experiences for decades, later saying that wartime trauma had made her withdrawn and unable to connect with others.

“I was silent for years, first because I wasn’t allowed to speak. Then I repressed it. I was angry with the world,” she told The Associated Press in 2004.

But after she addressed the opening of an Anne Frank exhibition in London in 1986, Schloss made it her mission to educate younger generations about the Nazi genocide. Over the following decades she spoke in schools and prisons, at international conferences and told her story in books including “Eva’s Story: A Survivor’s Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank.”

She kept campaigning into her 90s. In 2019, she traveled to Newport Beach, California to meet teenagers who were photographed making Nazi salutes at a high school party. The following year she was part of a campaign urging Facebook to remove Holocaust-denying material from the social networking site.

“We must never forget the terrible consequences of treating people as ‘other,’” Schloss said in 2024. “We need to respect everybody’s races and religions. We need to live together with our differences. The only way to achieve this is through education, and the younger we start the better.”

Schloss’ family remembered her as “a remarkable woman: an Auschwitz survivor, a devoted Holocaust educator, tireless in her work for remembrance, understanding and peace.”

“We hope her legacy will continue to inspire through the books, films and resources she leaves behind,” the family said in a statement.

Zvi Schloss died in 2016. Eva Schloss is survived by their three daughters, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

At CES, auto and tech companies transform cars into proactive companions

LAS VEGAS (AP) — In a vision of the near future shared at CES, a girl slides into the back seat of her parents' car and the cabin instantly comes alive. The vehicle recognizes her, knows it’s her birthday and cues up her favorite song without a word spoken.

“Think of the car as having a soul and being an extension of your family,” Sri Subramanian, Nvidia's global head of generative AI for automotive, said Tuesday.

Subramanian's example, shared with a CES audience on the show's opening day in Las Vegas, illustrates the growing sophistication of AI-powered in-cabin systems and the expanding scope of personal data that smart vehicles may collect, retain and use to shape the driving experience.

Across the show floor, the car emerged less as a machine and more as a companion as automakers and tech companies showcased vehicles that can adapt to drivers and passengers in real time — from tracking heart rates and emotions to alerting if a baby or young child is accidentally left in the car.

Bosch debuted its new AI vehicle extension that aims to turn the cabin into a “proactive companion.” Nvidia, the poster child of the AI boom, announced Alpamayo, its new vehicle AI initiative designed to help autonomous cars think through complex driving decisions. CEO Jensen Huang called it a “ChatGPT moment for physical AI.”

But experts say the push toward a more personalized driving experience is intensifying questions about how much driver data is being collected.

“The magic of AI should not just mean all privacy and security protections are off,” said Justin Brookman, director of marketplace policy at Consumer Reports.

Unlike smartphones or online platforms, cars have only recently become major repositories of personal data, Brookman said. As a result, the industry is still trying to establish the “rules of the road” for what automakers and tech companies are allowed to do with driver data.

That uncertainty is compounded by the uniquely personal nature of cars, Brookman said. Many people see their vehicles as an extension of themselves — or even their homes — which he said can make the presence of cameras, microphones and other monitoring tools feel especially invasive.

“Sometimes privacy issues are difficult for folks to internalize,” he said. “People generally feel they wish they had more privacy but also don’t necessarily know what they can do to address it.”

At the same time, Brookman said, many of these technologies offer real safety benefits for drivers and can be good for the consumer.

On the CES show floor, some of those conveniences were on display at automotive supplier Gentex’s booth, where attendees sat in a mock six-seater van in front of large screens demonstrating how closely the company’s AI-equipped sensors and cameras could monitor a driver and passengers.

“Are they sleepy? Are they drowsy? Are they not seated properly? Are they eating, talking on phones? Are they angry? You name it, we can figure out how to detect that in the cabin,” said Brian Brackenbury, director of product line management at Gentex.

Brackenbury said it's ultimately up to the car manufacturers to decide how the vehicle reacts to the data that's collected, which he said is stored in the car and deleted after the video frames, for example, have been processed. "

“One of the mantras we have at Gentex is we're not going to do it just because we can, just because the technology allows it,” Brackebury said, adding that “data privacy is really important.”