‘Eva’s Promise’
Susan Endel Kerner ’67 P’02 helps a Holocaust survivor keep a decades-old promise to her brother.
On a train bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau, a teenager named Eva made a promise to her older brother, Heinz. Packed into a cattle car with their parents, Erich and Fritzi, and other Jews in May of 1944, the siblings were scared. After a tip from a double agent, German soldiers had followed Eva and her mother during a visit to her father and brother hiding in a different house 10 minutes away. The family was captured on May 11, Eva’s 15th birthday. They had no idea where they were headed.
“[Heinz] told me that his paintings and his poems were hidden under the floorboard in the house where they were hiding,” Eva Geiringer Schloss recalled in an interview almost 80 years later. “He said, ‘Please, Eva, please go and pick it up and show to the world what I had achieved in my short life.’ And I said, ‘Of course, you will survive. I survive, you survive, and we go together.’ He said, ‘But promise me that you will go even if I’m not there.’”
Schloss died in January 2026 in London at the age of 96. An Austrian Jew, she lived across the street from Anne Frank in Amsterdam’s Merwedeplein neighborhood in the early 1940s. While much of the world knows the story of Frank—thanks to the efforts of Frank’s father and Schloss’s mother, who married in 1953—Schloss tells her own family’s story in the hourlong 2022 documentary Eva’s Promise. The film was co-produced by Susan Endel Kerner ’67 P’02, professor emerita of theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Conn co-hosted a screening of the film on campus in February, followed by an in-person conversation with Kerner and the film’s director, Steve McCarthy.
After the frightened Geiringers arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau 82 years ago, mother and daughter were separated from father and son for nearly a year. After being forced to march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen, Heinz and Erich were sent to Ebensee, a satellite concentration camp in Austria where they were forced to do slave labor hiding German armaments in mountain caves. Both men died there. Schloss and her mother survived, and Schloss was determined to keep her promise to her brother. Two years after their liberation, Schloss and her mother knocked on the door of her brother’s hiding place and, after the new owners reluctantly allowed them in, Schloss lifted a floorboard and retrieved the hidden treasures.
For more than 40 years after the Holocaust ended, the bereaved Schloss internalized her pain and moved on with her life. She married, had children and became a grandmother. But she realized there was more to keeping her promise than rescuing her brother’s art from beneath a dusty floorboard. Eventually she wrote three books about her family’s experience during and after the Holocaust. “She toured Europe, Asia and the United States as a Holocaust educator,” Kerner explains in the film. “Her focus now is on the story of her brother and sharing his legacy with the world.”
Kerner and Schloss first met 30 years ago when Kerner directed the world premiere of the play And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank, which is about two surviving friends of Frank: Schloss and Ed Silverberg, who was Frank’s teenage boyfriend before the Frank family went into hiding in 1942.
Some of Kerner’s distant relatives left Europe in the 1930s, she said. “I imagine their lives in pre-war Germany were very similar to those of the Frank and Geiringer families.”
That connection was part of what drove Kerner to help Schloss tell her own story.
“As a theater educator, I believe in the power of the arts to express deep emotion and to change people’s lives. Heinz and Erich resisted Nazi persecution through their painting and poetry. Their artistry gave them the strength and the hope they needed to survive two years in hiding during terrifying times,” Kerner said.
“In producing Eva’s Promise, my first film, it was my intention to keep this remarkable story alive, especially as we lose connection to the people and the events of a consequential period in our history. And, most personally, I loved Eva and it will always be the honor of my life that she trusted me to tell her story.”
Visit evaspromise.com for more information.