Anne Frank relative gives her 3rd Holocaust lecture at Viterbo

A Holocaust survivor who was a childhood friend of Anne Frank has become a regular friend of Viterbo University. 

Ninety-one-year-old Eva Schloss has given her third lecture in six years at Viterbo about her experiences, which included time in a Nazi concentration camp. 

Schloss spoke remotely from London on Wednesday, talking about how she met Anne Frank in Amsterdam.

“She was called Mrs. Quack Quack…because she talked so much,” said Schloss about Anne, who is famous for the diary she kept while her family hid from the Nazis. After the war ended, Eva’s mother married Anne Frank’s father Otto.  Both families had been sent to concentration camps.

Eva was separated from much of her family by the Nazis, including from her brother Hans who was an artist. He told her where he had hidden some of his paintings.

“He hid the paintings under the floorboards, with a note,” saying that he had planned to return for the paintings after the war. Hans did not return, but the paintings were recovered. 

Schloss also spoke of how notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele was persuaded to spare her mother’s life at the Auschwitz camp, after she had been condemned to die.

Eva is now 91, and has spoken worldwide about the Holocaust since the 1980’s.