"Eva's Promise" Excerpt
Transcript
Speaker 1
Heinz went to the Amsterdam Lyceum, which was a very good school and he was a very good pupil. And Heinz of course he had played piano. He got the accordion. Then he got a guitar, and he was sitting on the steps playing. So, all the other kids who like music came and so he had made friends immediately. Lots of friends. He was very, very popular.
Speaker 2
It was a happy time for Eva and Heinz. They sailed Heinz’s small boat on the Amstel River. They made friends and they met their neighbors in Merwedeplein, including the Frank family.
Speaker 1
One day a little girl came to me and said, “You are new here”. She said, “Come up to my apartment and then my dad can speak German with you”. So, I met her family, and the mother always made lemonade and cookies. And we became friends, but not best friend. Anne went to the Montessori school. And I went to the local- the ordinary local school.
Speaker 3
So they were, you could say, neighbors, Eva knew Anne. They had the same age. But Anne Frank was very popular and already interested in boys and so on. And Eva she was very childish and shy, so they were not really friends; but they knew each other.
Speaker 1
One day Anne said, “Oh, you're so lucky. You have a have a brother. I only have a sister.” So she said, “When can I come and visit you in your apartment?” And she did come, of course, one day, but Heinz wasn't interested. He didn't want to get a girlfriend and certainly not the age of his little sister. I started to be quite happy, but unfortunately not very long because in May, at night, we heard airplanes and guns and all kind of noise and parents put on the radio and it's a terrible news.
Speaker 4
When the sun rose on that fateful day, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Without warning or the slightest provocation, they unleashed upon their innocent neighbor the full terror and fury of a devastating blitzkreig.
Speaker 1
People became very anxious. We were stuck. Nobody could leave anymore, but nothing happened. Life carried on like normal. But then slowly, after about a couple of months, measures against the Jewish people started to come in newspapers, on the radio, posters. And it was a nuisance, but it wasn't life threatening. For instance, you were not allowed on the tram. Well, everybody had the bicycle. You had to stay in after 8:00, and you're not allowed to go out before 6:00 in the morning. Well, it didn't matter. Monopoly. The game Monopoly had just come out. So, we started to play in the evening Monopoly.
Speaker 3
The end of 1940, the Jewish civil servants were dismissed. Then all the Jewish people had to register, and halfway 1941 everybody had to have an identity card. And for the Jewish people, the “J” was stamped in it. So gradually, they were not allowed to go to the market anymore, to the cinema, to the swimming pool, and then they came separate schools, so it was all done by very small steps to prevent people to resist.
Speaker 5
The announcement came at the end of April that all Dutch Jews would have to wear a star sewn into their clothing. It was distributed by the Jewish Council with instructions and people had to go home and sew it into their clothes themselves. I think it was clear to most people that this was a branding, that this was a way of separating the Jews and people felt very embarrassed and they had to wear them.
Speaker 6
The principal at that time was called Gunning. He started this school and he was also, he stood up for the Jewish pupils at his school during the war. He refused to have people sign [speaking Dutch]. That's the kind of document that you needed to sign whether you were or were not Jewish. He rounded up all of his students here in this auditorium as well. And he gave what is called a “fare thee well” speech to them. And he was principal of our school from the beginning 1917. He's known for the extent to which he stood up for his Jewish pupils and accepted the consequences that were attached there.
Speaker 1
He was in the same class as Margot Frank. Heinz was very, very good in languages, and Margot was not so good and Heinz was not so good in the science, and Margot was, so sometimes they did homework together and helped each other. And then we got the postcard. Ordinary postcard that Heinz has to come within a week to a certain place to be deported to Germany to work in a German factory and many, many friends of him, including Anne’s sister Margo got it as well and many many other young people, I think he was only 15. So, my father called us together in the evening and he said “Heinz you're not going. We're going to go into hiding,” and my father explained, “I have found some wonderful Dutch people who belong to the resistance.”
Speaker 5
I don't think we can talk about the Dutch resistance. There was not one. There were a lot of small groups and different organizations and individuals who helped Jewish people.
Speaker 3
They arranged all kinds of places in hiding and they had a network of contacts when address was not safe anymore and they had big organization for forging papers. On which the identity cards you could have a false identity card on another name and not Jewish name. And yeah, sometimes you could even go on the street with it.
Speaker 1
I said, “Hiding, I don't understand”. So, my father explained, “I found some wonderful people who will keep us safe. But the apartments in Holland are very small. I couldn't find a family who would go to take in four people. So, we have to split up.” And I started to cry. I said, “No, I want to stay together. I don't want to be separated.” And my father said, “If we are in two different places, the chance the two of us will survive is bigger.” “Survive.” So, I think that was the first time that I realized it is a matter of life and death. And I must say from then on, I became really very, very scared. The hiding was not as simple as might think, because the Nazis did those house searches and people became scared and couldn't take the tension, because it was always at night. So people didn't dare to sleep. They really wanted to catch every Jew.
Speaker 5
In the Netherlands, there was a system of Jew hunting that was very active and very aggressive and people were paid by the head for every Jew that they were able to turn in.
Speaker 1
They were too scared to keep people for a long time. Sometimes it was six months, but sometimes only several weeks. So we changed about 6 or 7 times in the two years where we were hiding. Last place where Heinz and my father was taken were not in Amsterdam that was outside in a little town. Soestdijk, it was called. Heinz had so many different talents, my father said to Heinz, “You have to be silent, but let's paint and that time that that used to be painting was a big hobby. So there was enough material to buy. So the people who were they were hiding, went out and bought stretchers and linen. And so they had plenty of material like that to start with. And he started to write poetry because you can't paint. Especially this his one eye, his eye got tired. So he was actually very, very occupied.
Speaker 5
There's this term that historians use for what we call Jewish cultural resistance under these circumstances, called “Amidah”, and it basically refers to the idea that continuing to practice your your cultural traditions to continuing to elevate Jewish culture, to write Yiddish songs, to make paintings, to think about music under such circumstances is a form of spiritual resistance and cultural resistance. And I think that ties into what Erich and Heinz were doing.
Speaker 7
I'm the grandson of Eva Schloss. I'm actually a poet myself, and so when I read some of his his work. I'm just amazed at how mature, his perspectives were on life, but also how you know the situation that he was living in, how dark it it was, and where his thoughts took him, you know? And that, it's really sad. When you set out to write a poem look inside yourself for what are called feelings. For no matter how little you might know in your own world, you are the king. Whose wish reigns supreme, who is all knowing, and write about the battle within your soul. About a love effervescent in your heart. Write also about how you see life. Write about people who care about you. Write about what you feel when you see nature. In the end, nothing can ever emerge, as purely nothing can be as simple and yet as beautiful as what is born of your inner self. What is destined for you and you alone. What blows your way like a soft breeze. When I read his poems, what really comes through is his, you know, desire to express himself and to be recognized and to explore life, to share his experiences, his thoughts, to bring into the world so many of his sort of feelings and what was happening with within him. But you know, obviously being in hiding, his situation and the kind of grave destiny which he almost anticipated, I think. You know, there's definitely a a real heaviness and anticipation of what, what, what was coming.
Speaker 1
We had to visit them because I got very, very upset not being with Heinz and my father not seeing them and I miss them so much. Sometimes we had to go by tram, but then in the last hiding place we had to go even by train, which was by itself is very dangerous. Very often we could visit only if there was no room for us to stay the night. We were only allowed to come for the day, so my mother and my father usually disappeared pretty quickly, and so I stayed with Heinz of course, he told me again. Told me everything that he has done, he said to me, some of his poetry and he showed me his paintings. We played chess together. Yeah. So we had really a fantastic time.
Speaker 2
After two years, the family was running out of money. Eva's father decided it was time to find a new hiding place for himself and for Heinz.
Speaker 1
Many people had been arrested. Many people didn't want to do it anymore and so it was very difficult to find the hiding place. And so eventually at somebody said, there’s a nurse, who says she has a safe house and they could come there. And so my father phoned and said, “Look, it's so near. It's about 10 minutes walk. Why don't you come and visit?” And he asked the nurse if it's all right. That we can come. And she said, “Yeah, sure, sure. You can come and visit.” So we were very happy. We're very excited and we were very happy there. They made a nice meal. So they were extremely happy. It was near us, everything was good. And then that was on a Sunday and on Tuesday was my 15th birthday. And then there was a knock on the door and the Nazis storm in. Two Dutch police and two Nazis and go right from my mother and me and took us away. We got there and they separated me from my mother and they took me there and a tiny little room with a big Hitler picture on the wall and threw me on a chair and two Nazis with guns standing next to me and just started to throw questions at me. “How long have you been hiding? Where have you been?” And this And this and this and this. And I was in complete shock. This is probably the end of my life.
Speaker 2
The Geiringer family was betrayed by a nurse who was a double agent. She invited the Nazis in, serve them lunch, and then they arrested Heinz and Erich and took them to the police headquarters. They had followed Eva and her mother home when they visited Erich and Heinz, and they were arrested on the same day Eva's 15th birthday.
Speaker 1
We traveled for about 3 hours. They didn't tell us where we were going, and we came up to Westerbork, which was a holding camp.
Speaker 3
Westerbork was transition camp in the eastern part of the Netherlands, and there all the Jews were brought there before they were deported to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe.
Speaker 5
There's very important footage that was shot on May 19, 1944 by an inmate at the camp under the direction of the Nazi commander, and this was definitive evidence of the Holocaust taking place, and it shows us in a way that very little footage does, what it was like for people to get on these trains to death camps from the Netherlands.
Speaker 1
It was a cattle car, certainly not even for animals. It was, I think it was just for goods. It was certainly not for human beings. There was nothing in it. So just the floorboard and too many people were pushed in it. So there was no air, nothing. It was really a terrible, terrible journey. But the good thing I always say that was really the last time that we were together as a family, so it was terrible. But I know we were still together. My father apologized to us that from now on, he won't be able to protect us and it really cried. He was very upset. He said that I won't have any power to look after you Heinz. Heinz, he hardly talked. He was very, very nervous, very upset, very worried, I think. And he told me that his paintings and his poems are hidden under the floorboard. In the house where they were hiding. “And please, Eva, please go and pick it up and show it to the world. What I had achieved in my short life.” And I said, “Of course you'll survive. If I survive, you survive. We go together. He said, “No. No. But promise me that you will go if if I'm not there.” So very reluctantly. I promised.