Anne Frank’s stepsister says Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is “acting like another Hitler.”
“I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism,” wrote Eva Schloss, 86, in a piece published in Newsweek on Wednesday — Holocaust Memorial Day.
Schloss is an Auschwitz survivor. Frank and Schloss were Jewish refugees in Amsterdam and played together as children before their families went into hiding. Frank died in a concentration camp. Her father, who survived, married Schloss’s mother after the war.
{mosads}Schloss wrote in Newsweek about the Syrian refugee crisis, noting the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “Don’t stand by.”
She said if Trump becomes the next president, it would be a “complete disaster.”
Trump has called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and wants to put some mosques under surveillance following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. Some of the Paris attackers reportedly posed as refugees to enter Europe. Earlier this month, he also kicked a Muslim woman, who stood up in silent protest, out of a rally.
“We haven’t really learnt anything — I’m depressed by the current situation. The experience of the Syrian refugees is similar to what we went through,” Schloss said in Newsweek.
She said it’s upsetting that so many countries are closing their borders to refugees. If countries like the U.S. and Canada would take in more people “then we would get much closer to a solution,” she said.
“Fewer people would have died in the Holocaust if the world had accepted more Jewish refugees,” she added.
Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, tried to get visas to the U.S. in 1940 to save his family from the Holocaust but got denied, Schloss wrote. At the time, America didn’t want to take any more refugees.
“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 Nazisim. If we don’t work together, the world will never be able to resolve the threats it faces today,” she wrote.
“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.”