A screening of the documentary “Eva’s Promise” was held at Connecticut College’s Cummings Arts Center on February 15, drawing about 70 attendees from both the college and local community. The event featured a discussion with co-producer Susan Endel Kerner, a 1967 graduate of Connecticut College and professor emerita of theater at Montclair State University, along with the film’s director Steve McCarthy. Rabbi Jessica Goldberg, director of Zachs Hillel House and college chaplain, moderated the conversation.
The film tells the story of Eva Geiringer Schloss, an Austrian Jew who survived the Holocaust and lived across from Anne Frank in Amsterdam during the early 1940s. In May 1944, Eva and her family were captured by German soldiers after being betrayed by a nurse who had helped them hide. On a train to Westerbork transit camp, Eva’s brother Heinz asked her to promise that she would recover his hidden paintings and poems if he did not survive.
“[Heinz] told me that his paintings and his poems were hidden under the floorboard in the house where they were hiding,” Schloss recalled in an interview nearly 80 years later. “‘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 last month in London at age 96. After surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother Fritzi—while her father Erich and brother Heinz perished just before liberation—Schloss returned two years later to retrieve Heinz’s artwork as promised.
For decades after World War II, Schloss kept much of her pain private but eventually became active as a Holocaust educator. She wrote three books about her family’s experiences and traveled widely to share their story. “She toured Europe, Asia and the United States as a Holocaust educator,” Kerner explained in the film. “Her focus now is on the story of her brother and sharing his legacy with the world.”
Kerner met Schloss while directing a play about Anne Frank thirty years ago. According to Kerner: “Once she started speaking, she was dedicated to fighting discrimination and prejudice of all kinds,” adding that “Heinz Geiringer died at 18. He never married. He didn’t have children. His legacy is a collection of beautiful paintings and deeply felt poems.”
The screening was organized in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Eastern Connecticut and Lyman Allyn Art Museum alongside its exhibition “Art in the Holocaust” from Yad Vashem Collection. Since its release in 2022, “Eva’s Promise” has aired on PBS stations nationwide; producers hope it will become part of school Holocaust curricula.
Connecticut College President Andrea E. Chapdelaine addressed attendees before the screening: “At Conn, we are committed to the formation of thoughtful, ethical and engaged citizens. Films like Eva’s Promise help us live out that mission. They ask us to examine the consequences of prejudice and injustice, to consider our own responsibilities in the face of intolerance, and to reflect on how history shapes the present moment.”
Schloss’s commitment remains clear: “I have promised Heinz that he will not be forgotten. He will be remembered wherever I speak.”
