In 2019, Auschwitz survivor Ivor Perl returned to the death camp with his daughter Judi and grand-daughter Lia. Judi became agitated at his silence. “I can’t release my demons until you release yours,” she told him. “Why can’t you cry? I never see you cry!”
“I am crying inside every day,” he replied.
This emotional exchange, shown in BBC4’s The Last Survivors last week, echoes the pent-up pain felt by many Holocaust survivors.
The charity Generation 2 Generation, established in 2017, seeks to address this anguish. Its pioneering training programme offers the younger generation the skills to tell survivors’ stories with empathy and compassion.
Last Sunday, G2G held a landmark Zoom conversation between the writer and survivor Dr Eva Schloss MBE, stepsister of Anne Frank, and her grandson Eric, who worked with G2G to present her story. As they spoke, their sensitivity to each other was palpable.
Born in 1929 in Vienna, Eva led a normal family life until the Anschluss in 1938. The family fled to Belgium and then to Amsterdam, where they were hidden by the Dutch Resistance. They were betrayed in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
After liberation, Eva and her mother Elfreda returned to Amsterdam, where Elfreda married Otto Frank. Eva married a German-Jewish refugee and had three daughters, one of whom is Eric’s mother.
Struggling to come to terms with the loss of her father and gifted 16-year-old brother, Heinz, Eva focused at first on promoting Anne Frank, but gradually she began to reclaim her brother’s life, discovering his poetry and his paintings, hidden under floorboards in Amsterdam.
Her father, Erich Geiringer, inspired Eva to tell her own family’s story.
Asked which of Eva’s experiences affected him most, Eric hesitated, then pictured his grandmother’s terror while in hiding, hearing the SS just behind the thin door. “That feeling of being hunted,” he said. “It’s unfathomable.”
On the transports, Eva said: “We knew about being gassed. It was no secret whatsoever. What we expected was to be killed. I was 15. I thought I would not be alive much longer. But three miracles saved me.”
Her mother escaped the gas chambers by being offered a job with Dr Mengele, and she had a few treasured chance meetings with her father. Tragically, he and Heinz were murdered soon afterwards.
Eric, a poet himself, read some of Heinz’s poems, and admired his optimism and strength. “As a poet and a descendant, he inspires me,” he said.
The end of the war brought no closure for Eva. She was desolate, full of hatred. “It was Otto Frank who told me: ‘Those people you hate; they don’t suffer, but you do. After I stopped hating I felt much better.” Eric asked her: “How did you feel when you recovered Heinz’s poems and paintings?
“I felt guilty. Why had I survived and not him?” While Eric felt describing the camps was “too graphic, too incomprehensible, too mind-blowing for me”, Eva admitted that sharing her experiences with her family earlier would have spared her 40 years of nightmares. “But then I would be putting it all onto my children and grandchildren.”
At 92, Eva continues to travel the world, showcasing her brother Heinz’s art and poetry. Eric, to whom she is clearly very close, is “a link in this chain”. She insists she speaks for all marginalised people from whom dignity has been taken away.
Eric volunteers with non-profit organisations, linking people of different religious backgrounds. He said being a descendant of a Holocaust survivor has shaped his views of the world.
Earlier, Eric told the JC that before he became aware of G2G, he had never explicitly spoken about his grandmother’s story.
“Given that her experiences have shaped so much of my ideas, it felt like a natural progression to begin piecing her story together for myself. When I told her that I was thinking about starting the process with G2G, she was pleased. It’s important to her that the stories live on.”
He first became aware of the Holocaust aged nine, when he saw the play And Then They Came for Me, about Jewish children fleeing the Nazis, going into hiding and then being in the camps. He said: “This included the life of my grandmother as well as Anne Frank. I just remember it being very emotional for the family.
“The first time she spoke publicly about her life was in the 1980s. This was a watershed moment, a sort of catharsis, and she hasn’t really stopped speaking publicly since.”
In her books, Eva describes her feelings about becoming Anne Frank’s stepsister. “I know my grandmother greatly appreciated the lessons and wisdom Otto Frank shared with her. I know he spoke of Anne a lot and I think their shared experience of trauma and loss brought them together.”
