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HOLOCAUST HELL
I was born in Auschwitz in a train of dead bodies… I was meant to die & only survived because Nazis ran out of gas
Eva Clarke was born on April 29 1945, the day before Hitler committed suicide
BY rights, Eva Clarke should be dead.
She was born in a Nazi extermination camp where all mothers and their children were killed in the gas chambers.
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But the day before Eva’s emaciated mother gave birth to her in a filthy cart surrounded by dead and dying prisoners, the guards ran out of gas.
On Monday, King Charles, Prince William and world leaders commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp, where Eva’s father and 14 members of her family were murdered.
She has told The Sun her incredible story of survival against the odds to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which will honour the six million Jews slaughtered on Adolf Hitler’s orders in World War Two.
The other members of Eva’s family who died in Auschwitz were three grandparents, uncles, aunts and her cousin Peter, seven.
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Her father, Bernd Nathan, 33, a German architect, and her hat-maker mother Anka married in Czechoslovakia in May 1940.
The following winter, they were among the first Jews to be deported to Terezin, a concentration camp 40 miles north of the capital Prague.
Bernd was press-ganged into helping to build the ghetto there, which was a transit camp for Auschwitz and other death camps.
Eva, 79, from Cambridge, says: “There were various groups that would have been quickly sent to their deaths — the old, the sick, mothers with children, pregnant women, the mentally disabled, the physically disabled.
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“But because my parents were young, strong and able to work, they remained in Terezin for three years.”
Families there were segregated but Bernd and Anka would get together secretly.
In 1943 Anka discovered that she was pregnant.
Holocaust survivors in emotional visit to Auschwitz Nazi death camp where 1.1m people perished in WW2
Eva says: “It had very, very serious consequences because to become pregnant in a concentration camp was considered by the Nazis to be a crime punishable by death.
“When the Nazis discovered my mother and four other women were also pregnant, they made these five couples sign a document that when the babies were born, they would be handed over for euthanasia.
“My mother had never heard the word euthanasia. She had to go and ask somebody what it meant.
“In the event, the other four babies were born.
"We don’t actually know what happened to those families but assume they were all sent to Auschwitz and perished there.
“When my brother, George, was born in February 1944, he was not taken away from my parents but he died of pneumonia two months later.”
The Nazis said that the baby had to have a Jewish name and insisted on calling him Dan.
Six months later, Bernd was sent to Auschwitz camp near Krakow in Poland, where 1.1million prisoners, mainly Jews, were exterminated, among them members of Eva’s family.
Eva says: “Incredibly, my mother volunteered to follow him the very next day because she had no idea where he’d been sent.
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“Being an eternal optimist, she thought as they had survived three years up to that point, nothing could get any worse."
Little did she know. She never, ever saw him again.
Anka was already pregnant, with Eva, when she arrived at Auschwitz but was only there for ten days.
Eva says: “It was sheer hell on Earth. It was Dante’s inferno.
“She said it was indescribable. But she was in her mid-twenties. She was tough. She was strong.”
Because she was still able to work, Anka was sent with a group of women to a slave labour camp at an armaments factory in Freiberg near the German city of Dresden.
Eva says: “The place was crawling with bed bugs and the women were delighted.
"It meant there was food there. It also meant there was just a bit of warmth there — just a bit.
Anka spent six months there working as a riveter building V1 flying bombs while the Allies were constantly firebombing Dresden.
Eva says: “The Nazis locked everybody in the factory and they went to the air raid shelters.
'WITNESSES TO HORROR'
“Even though the prisoners knew the next bomb could fall on them, they were delighted because they realised it was the Allies.”
Incredibly, Eva’s future father-in-law, Welshman Kenneth Clarke, was a navigator in an RAF Lancaster bomber on the Dresden raids.
Eva says: “When he first met my mother and she told him her wartime history, he was absolutely devastated.
"He was in tears because he realised he could have killed her.”
But Anka’s life was also in grave danger as her pregnancy became more obvious.
Eva says: “Pregnant women were sent back to Auschwitz where the camp’s Angel of Death, Dr Josef Mengele, took the most unspeakable revenge on them because he felt they’d got away with it.”
But by the time the Germans realised Anka was pregnant, it was too late for her to be sent back because Auschwitz had been liberated — 80 years ago next week, on January 27.
But when it became apparent to the Germans that they were losing the war they began to empty the camps of living witnesses to the horror.
Nine months pregnant, Anka Nathan was put with 2,000 prisoners on a train of filthy coal wagons, open to the skies for 17 days with no food and little water.
The train stopped every so often and the doors were opened to throw out dead bodies.
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Eva says: “A farmer walked by and saw my mother.
"She described herself as looking like a scarcely living pregnant skeleton.
"She weighed five stone. The farmer was so shocked he brought her a glass of milk.
“But a Nazi officer standing near her raised his whip to shoulder height as if to beat my mother if she accepted the glass of milk.
“Suddenly, he lowered his arm and let her drink it. She maintained that saved her life.”
When the train arrived at Mauthausen, Anka was so terrified that the shock sent her into labour.
This punishment camp set in beautiful Austrian Alps was so brutal it was nicknamed the bone grinder.
Eva says: “My mother started to give birth to me on that coal truck.
"Unaided, she had to climb off the train and on to a cart pulled by prisoners.
There are three reasons why we survived. The first is a chilling one
Eva Clarke
“She proceeded to give birth to me with people lying all over her dying from typhus.
‘Do not wait for your husband. He was shot’
“Another Nazi officer who saw she was in labour said to her, ‘Du kannst weiter schreien’, which means you can carry on screaming.
“She always said she was screaming not only because she was in labour but because she thought this was her very last minute on Earth.
“But we both survived. I was born in that cart outside the gates of the camp.
"I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Incredibly, the Germans allowed a doctor, who was also a prisoner, to come to my mother.
"Presumably they allowed it because they could hear the guns in the distance.
“The doctor cut the umbilical cord and smacked me to make me cry, to make me breathe.
“There are three reasons why we survived. The first is a chilling one.”
Eva was born on April 29 1945. Just 24 hours earlier the Nazi guards had run out of lethal Zyklon B crystals for the gas chamber.
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The very next day, April 30, Hitler committed suicide and it became clear to the Germans that the war was almost over.
And, says Eva: “But the last — and the best reason — we survived is because the Americans liberated the camp on May 5.
“My mother reckoned she wouldn’t have lasted much longer. They think I weighed 3lb.
“Three-pound babies nowadays are put straight into an incubator.
“I always say perhaps I had the best incubator — she just held me all the time.”
Nine days after Eva’s birth, the war in Europe ended.
Her mum returned to the family home in Prague, where she quickly learnt that her beloved husband had been murdered.
Eva says: “It was quite soon after the end of the war that she met this mutual friend on the street in Prague.
“He stopped her said, ‘Do not wait for your husband. He was shot. I saw it’. And then the man just walked on.
'A NEW LIFE'
“Because my mother was given closure quite soon after the end of the war about my father, she was able to consider a new life.”
Three years later Anka married family friend Karel Bergman, a Czech Jew who fled to Britain and joined the RAF as an interpreter.
After the war, he returned to Prague to discover most of his family had been killed in Auschwitz.
He was offered a job at a textile factory in Cardiff, so Anka and Eva moved with him to South Wales.
To emigrate, Eva was issued with an almost-unique birth certificate that confirmed she had been born in a Nazi death camp.
Eva says: “My mother was very fortunate in her marriage to my stepfather. It lasted a long time.”
Karel died in 1983, aged 81, and Anka lived to be 96.
When she was 14, Eva met 16-year-old Malcolm Clarke at a cafe in Cardiff, who became a law professor at Cambridge University.
The couple married in 1968 and had sons Tim and Nick, and four grandchildren. Malcolm died last year.
Eva, who now gives talks for the Holocaust Educational Trust to school children, revisited Mauthausen with her mother.
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But Anka could never return to Auschwitz, where so many of her family had been killed.
Despite the horrors Anka witnessed, Eva says her mother was not bitter, adding: “She said, ‘You simply cannot move on if you’re just eaten up by hate’.
“My mother said that after the war, I gave her a reason for living.
“An awful lot of survivors committed suicide after the war, because having gone through those horrendous experiences, they had nothing to live for.
"But she had me.”
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How does that make you feel, I ask her.
“Very special.”
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