Memories of Holocaust in the words of youth

The dress rehearsal at Roosevelt High School this week was a little surreal.

Kelsey Sanders, 17, stood center stage, playing the lead role of Eva Geiringer, a 15-year-old Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz in 1944. She huddled under a tattered scarf, shivering with imagined cold.

Meanwhile, the real Eva Geiringer, a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, sat alone eight rows back from the stage, watching as a girl she'd not yet met — a girl who was born almost a half-century after World War II ended — acted out one of the most horrifying moments of her life.

"We could smell the human flesh burning," said Sanders, her young voice echoing into the microphone. "We pretended it was rubbish, but we knew."

The real Eva, who is now Eva Schloss, shifted in her seat, her gold-rimmed glasses glinting in the blue stage lights.

"And Then They Came For Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank" is an hourlong play that centers on the lives of two Holocaust survivors, Schloss and Ed Silverberg, both of whom were childhood friends of the famous diarist Anne Frank. The play was written in 1995 by James Still, who intersperses the live action on stage with projected video interviews with Schloss and Silverberg.

The play premieres at 7:30 tonight and runs through Saturday. Schloss will make a guest appearance at the end of each show.

"It's hard to watch [the show] sometimes," said Schloss, whose London English is salted with German and Dutch. She flew in from London for the production. "But these young people, in the cast and the audience later, are going to be the decision makers, the leaders, in the future.

"If you can affect one of them — if they can have an idea of what that experience was like — that will maybe stay with them."

Halfway through the dress rehearsal Monday, the six student actors and the student director took a break to meet Schloss backstage.

"It's so intimidating," said Devin Field, 18, a senior playing Schloss' brother, Heinz Geiringer, who died in Auschwitz in 1944. "I mean, how can amateur high-school actors like us do justice to her memory of these people, like her mom and her brother, who meant so much to her?"

Ruben Van Kempen, the director of the theater department at Roosevelt High School who arranged for the school's drama booster club to sponsor Schloss' visit, said he was nervous, too.

"I wondered if she was going to say, 'You're doing this wrong! You don't have that right!' " he said.

During the 15-minute meet-and-greet, Schloss did not critique the production, but instead spoke matter-of-factly about the importance of remembering the Holocaust.

"Humans have the ability to be hardened to things," she said. "But there are some things I never got over. Like the death of my father and especially my brother. ... Remembering their lives in front of thousands and thousands of people is one way they can, as Anne [Frank] writes in her diary, live on after death."

Schloss was a childhood friend of Anne Frank's when both their families lived in Amsterdam. After the war, Schloss' mother married Frank's father, Otto Frank.

Silverberg, the other Holocaust survivor whose story is featured in the play, was Anne Frank's first boyfriend, whom she writes about in the beginning of her diary.

Maddy Robinson, 18, who plays Anne Frank in this production and has read Schloss' first book, "Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank," said meeting Schloss Monday night was "just incredible." In the past few months, Robinson said, she's researched as much as she could about her life.

"When she finally walked in, I felt like I knew her," Robinson said. "But I know I have so much more to learn from her, too."

Haley Edwards: 206-464-2745 or hedwards@seattletimes.com