banner with eva schloss and text a historic evening with anne frank's stepsister featuring eva schloss march 19, 2019
Stepsister of Anne Frank and Survivor of Auschwitz To Come to Trinity
University prepares to host Eva Schloss for a historic evening

Trinity University's Laurie Auditorium will have the honor of hosting a "Historic Evening with Anne Frank's Step Sister." According to the event’s Facebook page, Eva Schloss, now 89, “will share her experiences as the childhood friend and step sister of Anne Frank, including accounts of the publishing of Anne's famed diary.” The highly anticipated event will take place on Tuesday, March 19, from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.

The lecture is open to the public. General admission tickets will cost $20 if purchased from Laurie Auditorium box office (1 Trinity Pl., San Antonio, Texas 78212), Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.–2 p.m. or roughly $30 (including all fees) if purchased online at Ticketmaster. A total of 200 complimentary tickets will be available for Trinity students only and can be picked up from Martha DeLeon from March 4-8 in Northrup Hall 410.

Eva Schloss’s presentation will offer visitors the opportunity to hear a compelling first-hand account of what it was like to live through the Holocaust and have a close relationship with Anne Frank, one of the most famous names in discussions of modern history and the traumas of war.

Schloss was born in Austria, which was invaded in 1938 by Germany, causing many Jewish families to desperately flee to evade persecution. Only 8 years old at the time, Schloss was among the emigrants who moved with her mother, father, and brother to Belgium and eventually to Holland. There, Schloss befriended a German Jewish girl in her neighborhood, whom we would come to know as Anne Frank. Schloss and Frank would play hopscotch and marbles together and eventually became stepsisters.

Tragically, both girls and their families were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. They were subjected to horrific conditions in captivity that included physical and emotional trauma, and living in dark crowded rooms infested with rats, epidemics, and starvation. While Anne Frank did not survive Auschwitz, her memories lived on through the accounts in her diary and the tireless efforts of her stepsister Eva Schloss to educate people on the realities of the Holocaust after her escape from the camp.

Dedicating herself to Holocaust education and global peace, Schloss has recounted her wartime experiences in more than a thousand speaking engagements. She has authored two books, and her life as a young Jewish woman living through persecution has been depicted in a play. Schloss is a co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK and signed the Anne Frank Peace Declaration.

Schloss’s impeccable life story and activism not only reminds us of the senseless prejudice that breeds so much violence around the world, but also the importance of treasuring the human experience that we all share rather than letting our differences drive us apart. Schloss’s indomitable spirit is a living demonstration of the ability of compassion to overpower fear.

The event is sponsored by The Chabad Center for Jewish Life & Learning and Trinity University, in conjunction with Holocaust Memorial Museum San Antonio, The Alamo Colleges District, OLLU—Our Lady of the Lake University, University of the Incarnate Word, St. Mary's University, Texas A&M University—San Antonio and UTSA—The University of Texas at San Antonio.

Danyal Tahseen '19 helped tell Trinity's story as an intern with Strategic Communications and Marketing.

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