Montclair Professors’ Film About Holocaust Survivor Fulfills ‘Eva’s Promise’

Steve McCarthy (Communication and Media) and Professor Emerita Susan Kerner (Theatre and Dance) are featured in this NorthJersey.com profile about their documentary, Eva’s Promise, which follows Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss’ efforts to share her 17-year-old brother Heinz Geiringer’s hidden artwork after he died in a concentration camp.

Eva Schloss kept her Holocaust survival story quiet for decades. It took that long for her night terrors to subside, said Steve McCarthy, who, along with Susan Kerner, is racing to finish the film with the help of the 93-year-old Schloss.

“When we met her she told us two things: Get it done, and hurry,” McCarthy said.

After being discovered by the Nazis in an Amsterdam hideaway during World War II, Schloss (then Geiringer) and her parents and brother Heinz were sent to Auschwitz/Birkenau; only she and her mother survived.

But on the train to the camps, Heinz made his sister promise that if he didn’t come back, she would retrieve the trove of paintings and poems he’d hidden under the floorboards of his Amsterdam hideaway.

After Schloss and her mother were liberated by the Russians, she returned to Amsterdam and discovered her brother’s artwork and poetry, now on display in an Amsterdam museum.