A Father and Son Did Not Survive the Holocaust, but Their Paintings Did
Erich and Fritzi Geiringer were living with their 11-year-old son, Heinz, and 8-year-old daughter, Eva, in Austria in 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed that country. As a Jewish family, they were targets for Nazi persecution. They left for Belgium and later moved to the Netherlands.
In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands and began imposing antisemitic restrictions there, too. All Jewish children had to attend Jewish schools. Erich could no longer continue his business. As their lives became more endangered, Erich secured false papers for the family from the Dutch underground. After Heinz received a deportation order in 1942 to a forced labor camp, the family decided to go into hiding, separately.
Fritzi and Eva moved into a woman’s attic. Erich and Heinz lived with a different family. Fritzi and Eva were able to occasionally leave the attic, but the men could not leave their hiding place safely. Erich and Heinz, by then 16, occupied themselves by painting, studying foreign languages, and writing poetry.
Erich painted the two portraits of Fritzi displayed above this story. Heinz painted moody scenes, including two self portraits — one working at a desk in an imaginary room, and the other sitting in despair. But he also painted a bright farm landscape shown through a window.
When both the men’s and the women’s hiding arrangements became unstable, the pairs relocated to new hiding places, again in other families’ homes. A neighbor denounced the family, and they were deported first to Westerbork transit camp, and a few days later, to Auschwitz.
Fritzi and Eva endured forced labor, but managed to survive Auschwitz. The Soviet Army liberated them in January 1945.
In the days before that liberation, knowing the Soviets were approaching, camp officials forced nearly 60,000 prisoners, including Erich and Heinz, to evacuate Auschwitz on a death march.
Fritzi later received a letter from the Red Cross telling her that Heinz had died of exhaustion in April 1945, and Erich died three days before the end of the war.
In 1952, Eva married Zvi Schloss, and they had three daughters and several grandchildren. In 1953, Fritzi married Otto Frank, an Auschwitz survivor and father of the famous diarist Anne Frank. They shared a similar grief experience, as Otto’s wife was killed at Auschwitz in 1945, and his daughters died that same year at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after having been transferred there from Auschwitz.
Eva Schloss donated images of her father’s and brother’s paintings to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The artists had hidden their works, which were retrieved after the war, under the floorboards of their hiding place.
All images US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eva Schloss.
Learn more about children hidden during the Holocaust.
