Breaking News Emails
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — The stepsister of Anne Frank planned to meet Thursday with Southern California high school students who were photographed gleefully giving Nazi salutes around a swastika formed by drinking cups during a party.
Eva Schloss, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, was to speak privately with those students at Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach and talk to news media afterward, said Rabbi Reuven Mintz of the local Chabad Center for Jewish Life.
The party photo surfaced last weekend, shocking the wealthy seaside community as the teens were identified as students from Newport Harbor High and other local schools.
School officials and other leaders condemned anti-Semitic actions, and hundreds of people came to a meeting at the school Monday to express outrage.
Like Frank, the world-famous Jewish diarist who died in the Holocaust, Schloss and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam during World War II but were betrayed and sent to the Auschwitz death camp. She was eventually liberated by the Russian army in 1945.
Schloss, whose mother married Frank's father, Otto Frank, in 1953, has told her story in talks to schoolchildren and in books including "Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Stepsister of Anne Frank."
Frank was born in Germany and fled to the Netherlands with her family as Adolf Hitler rose to power.
After Germany invaded the Netherlands, her father created a secret living space where she kept her now-famous diary for two years before being discovered. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15.