A grainy video shot in Amsterdam almost 80 years ago shows Anne Frank looking out the window: the teenage author of the famous and moving diary is clearly recognizable as she watches a wedding pass by in the street.
"I know because I shot it", explains Eva Geiringer Schloss, a peer and, unlike Anne, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, in the documentary Eva's Promise presented at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan on the eve of January 27, the chosen by the United Nations to remember the victims of the Holocaust.
Parallel lives before the massacres.
Eva was Anne's neighbor in Amsterdam.
Both emigrated with their families to Holland to escape the Nazi persecution against the Jews, the two girls sometimes played together even though they attended different schools, Anne Montessori, Eva the public school.
Now 94, Schloss lives in London.
Eva's Promise tells her story against the backdrop of the crossed fate that forced her to live for decades in her friend's shadow: in a tragic twist of fate, Anne is her posthumous half-sister because her mother Eva, who survived with her to the deportations, after the war she married Otto Frank.
It was when Otto showed 'Eva her daughter's diary that she remembered' the promise made in extremis to her older brother Heinz in the last conversation on the freight train which, in May 1944, was transporting them to the concentration camps.
It is the promise that gives the title to the documentary, produced by Susan Kerner and directed by Emmy winner Steve McCarthy: to return to the attic where Heinz had hidden with his father Erich and recover the painted paintings and poems under the floorboards written during the years of forced imprisonment.
Heinz, Eva later learned from the Red Cross after the war, died of fatigue after a forced march from Poland to Mauthausen in April 1945, while for Erich the end came three days before the end of the war.
Returning to Amsterdam, Eva recovered around twenty paintings and 200 poems, which were then donated to the resistance museum in the Dutch city.
She and her mother returned to live in the same abandoned apartment in 1942 to hide in the attics.
"We found it as intact as when we had left it, with all our memories of a still normal life inside", says Schloss who for 40 years, until after Otto Frank's death in 1980, had refused to talk about the Holocaust: it was only by reflecting on her stepfather's commitment to keeping Anne's memory alive that the former Amsterdam girl began to take on the responsibility of making people remember.
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