As Ken Livingstone listened intently, Eva continued her story by describing the return to Amsterdam after the war in Europe had finally ended. Not long after their arrival, Mr Frank came to pay Eva and her mother a visit. He hoped that they might have any scrap of information that could lead him to news of his daughters. As the two adults eventually learnt of the terrible fate of their families, they became a support for each other and their friendship blossomed. Eva had finished telling Ken Livingstone her story and her focus returned to the present time of March 1986, the room full of people, the new Anne Frank exhibition being launched and the congratulatory speeches being made by the dignitaries.
As the formal proceedings wound to a close, Livingstone suddenly pushed back his chair and stood up. To her horror, Eva heard him announce to the audience, ‘And now, just before we finish, Eva is going to say a few words to you.’ Eva started trembling. There was nothing to be done. She nervously got to her feet and was handed a microphone. As if she were watching herself from a distance, she heard a stream of words coming out of her mouth. From not having had any previous desire to share her wounds publicly, it was as though, once the words had started to flow, they were continuing under their own momentum. The words themselves wanted to let the world know the true horror of the Holocaust.
Eva told the audience about her early childhood in Vienna, the family’s flight to Amsterdam by way of Brussels, their happy times living in the Merwedeplein apartments, how she had got to know her contemporary Anne Frank, her family’s enforced hiding from the Nazis, their betrayal and the horrors of the time in Auschwitz with her mother. She describes her anguish when her mother had been selected for the gas chamber and she thought she had been murdered. Thankfully a plea to the notorious camp doctor, Josef Mengele, by a cousin who happened to be a camp nurse saved Fritzi’s life. But it was several months before mother and daughter were reunited, as Fritzi had been staying in the hospital block. So their separation during the post-liberation train journey across Europe had not been the first time they had been forced apart.
When Eva finished telling her story on that spring night in London, she sat down in shock at what she had done, contemplating what the response would be from her mother alongside her, and her daughter Jackie in the audience, who were listening intently. She need not have worried. A large crowd made up of family and strangers gathered around her, all telling her ‘Well done’, including Fritzi, whose own story had now been made public.
After this first spontaneous speech, Eva was asked by the Anne Frank House to speak at openings of the exhibition which was starting to travel around the UK. She and her husband Zvi worked together on writing her earliest speeches, and Eva recalls reading the first ones very nervously and badly. She admitted to me once that she actually took a tranquilliser to calm her nerves before these early speeches. Travelling with the exhibition to different cities, she became fascinated to learn about people’s lives in the final years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, and because the exhibition was attracting interest across the social and political spectrum, she saw for herself divided communities.
Ken Livingstone has been a controversial figure, most recently with his insistence that Adolf Hitler supported the idea of Zionism as a way of ridding Europe of its Jews, before he devised the ‘Final Solution’. This has been particularly offensive to Holocaust survivors. However, Eva, as a Holocaust survivor herself, remains grateful to him for setting her on an irreversible path to educating tens of thousands of people about Nazism and the Holocaust.
I have not counted, but I have probably heard Eva speak over a hundred times. I have listened to her, and have often been asked to introduce her, in a wide variety of settings: exhibition openings in cathedrals and civic halls, in schools, colleges and prisons, and even at the Anne Frank Trust’s fundraising events. In every speech she makes, she includes something different and I invariably get to hear a surprising new fact or insight. Eva tailors the account of her experiences to what she wants a particular audience to take away from it, as you will understand further on in this book when she has addressed prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs, a high-security prison in London. She believes in people taking all the opportunities and chances they are offered in a democratic and free society, and realizes that she is becoming more liberal-leaning and worried about social inequalities as she gets older. I have found her recently to be more pessimistic about the future and questioning as to whether we have indeed made the difference we educators, and her stepfather Otto Frank, had hoped to. I hope that when she reads the following pages it will help to alleviate that feeling.
Having lived for more than half of her life being shy and reticent, Eva in her later years does not hold back from sharing her views, most recently about governments accepting more refugees fleeing conflicts. In her role as a founder, Trustee, and now Life President of the Anne Frank Trust, she has been a vociferous and hugely valued advocate who has travelled all over the UK supporting the Trust with her presence, but has also proved to be a critical friend when she feels strongly about an issue or activity. When people hear Eva Schloss speak, they never forget the experience and still talk about it years later.
A few months after she had first started her journey as a speaker, a friend encouraged her to write her story down. Eva enlisted the help of Evelyn Kent, a teacher who was also the mother of a school friend of her daughter, and together Eva and Evelyn set about the task. Eva’s Story was published in 1988 by W.H. Allen, and subsequently was self-published by Eva and Evelyn under the publishing imprint Castle Kent, Castle being the German for Eva’s surname Schloss. Thirty years on, it is still a hugely popular book, translated into eight languages. Eva has subsequently written two further memoirs, The Promise published by Puffin Books in 2004 and After Auschwitz by Hodder & Stoughton in 2013, now in a Russian edition. The Promise, aimed at younger readers, focuses on Eva’s older brother Heinz, a very talented artist, poet and musician. The book’s title concerns a promise that their father Erich Geiringer made to his son while the family were all still living together before going into hiding, but in continual fear of their possible fate at the hands of the Nazis. In answer to Heinz’s anxious question, ‘Pappy, do we live on in any way after we die?’, Geiringer decided that he could not give his teenage son an unrealistic belief in his survival, as the odds were so firmly stacked against it. He looked his beloved teenage son in the eye and told him gently that even if you died, part of you would always remain because of what you leave behind. This answer motivated Heinz to indulge his love of painting by creating many skilful canvases. Almost as if he knew his fate, Heinz managed to hide fifteen of his paintings under the floorboards of the apartment.
In 1998, the American writer James Still encapsulated Eva’s story in a play called And Then They Came for Me, Remembering the World of Anne Frank. The play simultaneously tells the story of Ed Silverberg, who was born Helmuth Silberberg in Germany and emigrated as a refugee to Amsterdam, like the Frank and Geiringer families. Ed was Anne Frank’s boyfriend before she went into hiding and in her diary was known by his nickname ‘Hello’. Through assuming a false identity, Ed had survived the Holocaust and went to live in New York, where he married another survivor and died in 2015. The multimedia production, depicting young Eva, Heinz, their parents Erich and Fritzi Geiringer, Ed and his parents, a Hitler Youth member and, in the final scene, Anne Frank, continues to be performed around the world and is often used as a drama-in-education tool for schools. Eva is delighted at the diversity of the casting in productions of the play; she has seen her father Erich played by a black man and Anne Frank by an Oriental girl. Nic Careem, the Sri Lankan-born human rights activist who had helped promote the Anne Frank Declaration and the Trust’s work in prisons in its early days, was very helpful in getting And Then They Came for Me performed in some influential settings, such as New Scotland Yard, the House of Commons, the Russian and Chinese embassies and eventually in China itself.
In July 2016, I visited Eva in
her central London apartment, two weeks after her husband Zvi had passed away at the age of 91. We spoke about Zvi’s philosophy of life. Born in Munich in 1925, he had also fled the Nazis and arrived in Palestine in 1936. Zvi’s grandfather had been a very popular doctor, and was generous in giving free treatment to those who could not afford to pay. For this reason, he felt that nothing would happen to him, as there were surely many non-Jews who would protect him. It wasn’t to be. After his wife was deported to Latvia in 1939, Zvi’s grandfather killed himself, leaving no suicide note.
Eva had first met Zvi Schloss in London in the early 1950s. Zvi had come from Israel to study economics and Eva, encouraged by the keen photographer Otto Frank, was studying photography. It so happened that Eva and Zvi were both renting rooms in the same building. They spent a lot of time together, and eventually fell in love. Zvi duly asked her to marry him, but to his great disappointment, Eva turned him down. Much as she cared for him, she felt that after her apprenticeship she should go back to Amsterdam to look after her widowed mother. But then Otto Frank arrived in London to see Eva, and stunned her with some amazing news. Otto and Fritzi had fallen in love and were going to get married. Eva felt relieved. After so much sorrow, four broken lives fell happily into place. Eva and Zvi married in 1952, and Otto and Fritzi the following year.
Over a typical Viennese afternoon tea and cake on elegant china, our conversation on that July afternoon in 2016 turned to the Frank family and Eva’s personal recollections of Anne. The Franks and the Geiringers had lived in the same development in the New South area of Amsterdam, known as the Merwedeplein. Built between the wars in a simple Dutch style, the Merwedeplein apartments had become popular with German and Austrian Jewish refugees who felt a comfort in living surrounded by their compatriots. The apartment blocks were built around a central grassy area where the children, Jewish and non-Jewish, played together and got to know each other. Eva recalls a very good-looking older boy who had a ‘real Dutch look and we all fancied him’.
As the Franks lived at apartment No 37 and the Geiringers at No 46, and Anne and Eva were only one month apart in age, it did not take long for them to get to know each other. Eva remembers Anne as having been very popular with both boys and girls. Anne was into magazines, movie stars, and at 12-years-old was generally more adult than most of the other girls. Among their playmates, Anne was the one who had ideas and always insisted on things being done her own way. Eva surprised me by an insight into Anne’s own view of herself, saying, ‘I thought Anne was very pretty. I am sure this was due to the fact that she was so lively and animated. Always talking, always laughing. But I know that Anne wanted to be prettier than she felt she was.’ Susanne Ledermann, the pretty dark-haired girl with socks usually crumpled around her ankles in Otto Frank’s photos, was very sweet and friendly according to Eva, who admits to even having a schoolgirl crush on ‘Sanne’, as she was known. The sweet and friendly Susanne was murdered in Treblinka in November 1943 on the day of her arrival at the camp.
When the Jewish children were forced by the anti-Jewish decrees to leave their mainstream schools, Eva’s parents decided not to send their daughter to the Jewish Lyceum that they were instructed to attend. They didn’t feel that Eva’s Dutch was good enough. Instead, Eva and nine other Jewish children were taught privately in the home of a local Jewish teacher, Mr Mendoza, from the Amsterdam Sephardi community. Five centuries after his ancestors had fled the anti-Semitic persecution of medieval Spain, Mr Mendoza and his mother were deported by new persecutors and killed. Fritzi and Erich Geiringer visited Otto and Edith Frank to ask if they would like Anne to join this group, but the Franks declined, probably understanding full well how much their daughter thrived on the social interaction of school. Eva thinks this was the only time that the two couples spent any time together, the two couples who would eventually become one.
Eva then told me about the time she encountered Anne Frank in a dress shop. She had heard, from behind the dressing-room curtain, Anne’s voice firmly instructing the assistant on what alterations were needed to make the coat she was trying on suitable for her taste. Eva compared this to her own 12-year-old self, far too involved in sporty and tomboyish pursuits to be considering the trimmings and hemline of a coat. This picture of Anne painted by Eva gives us an impression of a very self-confident, perhaps precocious, girl, and this has been verified by interviews with some of Anne’s other friends, such as Hannah Goslar and Jacqueline van Maarsen.
After the war, despite her adoration for her lost father Erich Geiringer, Eva grew to have a deep love and respect for her stepfather Otto Frank.
He helped me a lot as I was very miserable, full of hatred and mistrust of people. He told me that I mustn’t go through my life hating everybody because I will be the one to suffer. He also told my mother that I had to go back to school because a good education was something nobody could take away from me. I went back to school but was very unhappy. I felt I was an adult because of all the terrible things I had experienced and I couldn’t relate to the others in my class.
Eva looked wistfully out of the window and continued:
After finishing school I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life and didn’t really care. Otto and my mother decided I should become a photographer and this is what I did. Otto gave me his beloved Leica camera and my first commission was to take a photo of Miep and Jan Gies, with their baby son Paul and Otto. Otto, who was such a keen photographer, must have spotted something in me. He knew someone in London who had a photographic studio and so in 1951 I went off to London to become an apprentice.
Eva discussed differences she saw between Otto’s first wife Edith and her own mother Fritzi. Although Fritzi had initially struggled with learning Dutch on her arrival in Amsterdam, she had persevered. Perhaps because of intense homesickness for Germany, Edith had not learnt to speak Dutch, unlike Otto who quickly mastered the language, and this possibly gave Edith an added sense of insecurity in her country of refuge. Fritzi Geiringer was a tall and handsome woman, confident and outgoing in men’s company, whereas photos of Edith Hollander-Frank show a plainer and more simply dressed woman, even when her girls were babies and Edith would only have been in her twenties. Eva referred to Edith Frank as ‘a dedicated housewife’, comparing her to her mother Fritzi who enjoyed a range of other interests such as playing the piano.
I asked Eva about her recollection of Margot. Was she the quiet, deep-thinking and bookish girl overwhelmed by her vivacious younger sister as one feels from Anne’s diary? Eva’s older brother Heinz knew Margot better than Eva did, as they were the same age and were in the same class at the Jewish Lyceum. As they lived so close and were both studious, Heinz and Margot sometimes did their homework together at one or another’s apartments. More than that she couldn’t say.
Pouring another cup of tea, Eva then went on to recall the terrible days in the summer of 1945 when she, her mother and Otto, who frequently visited their home, had learnt of the fates of their respective families. She told me about one particularly day that unbeknown to her then would have a long-term effect on her life.
One day Otto arrived with a small brown paper parcel tucked under his arm. He opened it and showed us a red checked cloth notebook. It was Anne’s diary. To our astonishment he said he was considering publishing it. At that moment I certainly didn’t imagine what would follow, thirty million copies sold, the museum in Amsterdam, the hundreds of responses to children’s letters my mother and Otto would write.
And then she looked at me with a half-smile and said, ‘Otto found consolation talking with my mother about everything that was going through his mind.’
To the Nazis, Heinz Geiringer had been just another tattooed number – a young Jew to be tormented to his death in Mauthausen slave labour camp. But to his adoring little sister Eva, the loss of this talented artist and poet, gifted pianist, guitarist and accordionist, avid reader (lover of the world of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster), who while in hiding taught himself six la
nguages but still found time to make his sister laugh, profoundly affected her whole life. Much of Eva’s motivation for her long years of educating about the Holocaust was to have the opportunity to speak about Heinz. His spirit was with her when she was awarded an MBE at Buckingham Palace in 2012, given honorary degrees from the universities of Northumbria and York St John for her educational work and umpteen civic honours. It is with her when she speaks out publicly about the treatment by governments of modern-day refugees. Heinz is there in her metaphorical suitcase as she travels around the world, including to nearly every American state.
In 1945, after the Red Cross had confirmed by way of a short and formal telegram that both Erich and Heinz Geiringer had died in Mauthausen concentration camp, Fritzi and Eva decided to pay a visit to their former apartment. Otto Frank had received some comfort from being given Anne’s diary and reading her words. Perhaps if they could find Heinz’s paintings, they would receive some comfort too. When they rang the doorbell they found the flat to be occupied by a couple who were not surprisingly rather suspicious of them, but nonetheless they were able to convince the couple that their intentions were honourable. With their hearts racing, Eva and her mother found the very floorboard they remembered was hiding the cache of paintings, lifted it with trembling fingers, and sure enough buried underneath, there they were – all of Heinz’s secreted paintings. Along with the paintings were 200 poems he had written too. Thanks to a vision by the South African Holocaust & Genocide Centre, images of these deeply-haunting paintings are now included in an international travelling exhibition, ‘The Promise, A Holocaust Tale of Love and Hope’ (the originals were donated by Eva to the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam). In line with the promise his father made to him, Heinz is becoming known through his own talent.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 9
