Anne Frank's stepsister and Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss on Thursday spoke with the Southern California students who were photographed giving Nazi salutes around a swastika formed by drinking cups during a party, The Press-Enterprise reports.
Schloss, 89, lives in London but was in Orange County this week to speak at Chapman University. She met with students and their families in a closed-door meeting after local Jewish leaders asked her to.
"I was shocked in 2019, in a well-educated town and well-educated school, incidents like this could still happen," she told reporters. "I was keen to hear from the children."
Schloss told the high schoolers she was around their age when she came out of the Auschwitz concentration camp and detailed how Nazis packed children into a bus and gassed them to death.
"I realized I would never have my family again because they were all gone," she said.
Schloss, who married Anne Frank's father, Otto, after the Holocaust said the students and parents apologized.
"(The students) told me it was a joke, which I can't quite understand," she said. "But, remember, Prince Harry was just 18 years old when he wore a Nazi uniform to a friend's costume party, which caused quite a scandal at the time."
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