By Ishaan Tharoor
In a column published in Newsweek, Eva Schloss, an 86-year-old Auschwitz survivor, leveled sharp criticism at Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who has surged in the polls on the back of a populist, anti-immigration platform.
Schloss, who is based in London, was writing on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was marked around the world Wednesday. She likened the struggles and hardships faced by Jewish refugees in the 1930swith the suffering of Syrians and others now, many of whom are desperately seeking sanctuary in the West.
"I am very upset that today again so many countries are closing their borders," wrote Schloss. "Fewer people would have died in the Holocaust if the world had accepted more Jewish refugees."
She aims particular opprobrium at Trump, who has called for a total cessation of Muslim arrivals to the United States and the deportation of millions of Hispanics living in the country.
"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," Schloss wrote. She is hardly the first person to level the charge of fascism at the presidential candidate, but she carries a uniquely moral voice.
Born in Vienna, Schloss and her family first fled to Belgium and then the Netherlands following the Nazi annexation of Austria. In Amsterdam, she became childhood friends with Anne Frank, the famed Holocaust diarist.
"We children all played together outside – skipping, hopscotch and marbles – and one day a girl ran over to me and introduced herself. ‘I’m Anne and my family comes from Germany,’" Schloss recounted in a 2008 interview. She added that, despite her being a month older than Frank, "Anne was much more mature and grown-up than me."
The families separately went into hiding and eventually were seized by Nazi authorities and deported to concentration camps in the east. Schloss's father and brother perished. Frank's father, Otto, was the only surviving member of their family; he married Schloss's mother Elfriede in 1953, which made Anne, posthumously, Schloss's stepsister.
Despite her ordeal and the horrors of Nazism, Schloss now believes the current moment is more stark than the past because there's little global consensus about what to do about the Syrian crisis.
"The situation today is worse than it was under Hitler because at that time all the Allies — the U.S., Russia and Britain — worked together to combat the terrible threat of Nazism," she wrote. Schloss concluded: "I remember how upset the world was when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 and now everybody is building walls again to keep people out. It’s absurd."
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