Eva Schloss, now 86, became stepsister to Anne Frank when Eva’s mother married Anne’s father after World War II. Anne Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who documented her personal experiences in a diary while under the World War II rule of Adolf Hitler. Her personal account become one of the most compelling journals ever written. Anne and Eva were friends before the war. Both were young girls when they were taken to Auschwitz, but only Eva Schloss survived.
Now living in London, Schloss is very aware of the racist rhetoric Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spreads throughout world. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Schloss has had no problem likening Donald Trump to one of the most horrific war criminals and mass-murderers in known history. In an Newsweek open letter :
"If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the U.S. it would be a complete disaster. I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism."
Eva Schloss calls Trump’s proposed “huge” wall to keep immigrants out of America “absurd” and believes his proposed ban on all Muslims and Syrian refugees entering the U.S. would cause many deaths. Schloss believes we “haven't really learnt anything” and points out poignant similarities between Syrian refugees and Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. believes fewer people would have died in the Holocaust if the world had accepted more Jewish refugees.
I travelled to America last year to speak at screenings of the documentary film, No Asylum, which reveals an unknown chapter of Anne Frank’s life, and details how her father, Otto, struggled to obtain visas to the U.S. in 1940. He tried everything to save his family from the Holocaust. He knew someone who worked in Roosevelt’s administration and begged him to do anything possible, but in the end his request was rejected. America didn’t want to take any more refugees in the 1940s.
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Trump has been compared to Hitler many times by people from all walks of life, including veterans, members of his own political party—he doesn’t seem to care.
Many are grateful to Eva Schloss for speaking out against hate speech and for the plight and human rights of Syrian refugees. Donald Trump has not responded, and if he has even a spec of decency, reverence, or respect, for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, he will keep his bombastic comments to himself.
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