CAIRO – Rejecting his campaign tirades as racist, Anne Frank’s stepsister has compared US Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump of “acting like another Hitler.”
“If Donald Trump become(s) the next president of the US it would be a complete disaster,” Eva Schloss, now 86, told Newsweek on Wednesday, January 27.
“I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.”
Schloss was a friend of Frank in Amsterdam after their families fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Her mother, Fritzi, would marry Otto Frank, Anne’s father, after World War II.
Schloss survived Auschwitz while Frank and her mother died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Anne Frank’s diary became a famous account of life as a Jewish family under Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Living in London, Schloss has also criticized the US and Western European governments for their response to the Syrian crisis, likening the refugees’ experience in 2016 “to what we went through” in Nazi-controlled Europe.
“I remember how upset the world was when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961,” Schloss said.
“And now everybody is building walls again to keep people out. It’s absurd.”
Muslims make up 1% of America’s 322 million population, according to Pew Research center.
Anti-Muslim sentiments have reached an all-time high after the rise of the so-called Islamic State, formerly known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Moreover, the Republican presidential candidates, such as Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson, have added to increasing anti-Muslim sentiments.
Trump’s views on immigration have sparked controversy nationwide, especially his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the US.
Racist
It is not the first time for the controversial politician to be compared to Hitler.
In November, Jeb Bush adviser Max Boot tweeted that the GOP front-runner “is a fascist,” while a British newspaper asked its readers in December, “Who Said It: Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler?”
Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, has also compared Trump to the Nazi leader after he called for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration into the US.
“If you go and look at your history and you read your history in the lead-up to the Second World War, this is the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward,” she told CNN on December 9.
“Because you have people who were scared the economy was bad, they want someone to blame.”
Earlier this week, US Democratic presidential front-runner Hilary Clinton lambasted the “dangerous” rhetoric of Republican counterpart Donald Trump as a direct reason behind the rise of Islamophobia in the country.
A few weeks ago, Trump’s campaign officials removed a Muslim woman silently protesting at a Trump rally, prompting the Council on American-Islamic Relations to demand an apology from the campaign.