Eva Geiringer was born in Vienna to a Jewish family. Shortly after the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, her family emigrated to Belgium and finally to the Netherlands. She lived in the same apartment block in Amsterdam as Anne Frank, and the girls, only a month apart in age, were sometimes playmates from ages 11 to 13. In 1942, both girls went into hiding to avoid the Nazi effort to capture the Jews of Amsterdam. In May 1944, Schloss's family was captured by the Nazis after being betrayed by a double agent in the Dutch underground, and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camps. Her father and brother did not survive the ordeal, but she and her mother were barely alive when they were freed in 1945 by Soviet troops.