To be born in a Nazi death camp was remarkable enough, but Eva Clarke and her two ‘siblings of the heart’ also lived to tell the tale. In the 70th anniversary year of the liberation of concentration camps, Hannah Stephenson hears their incredible story

She grew up in Wales and has spent much of her adulthood in Cambridge – but 70-year-old Eva Clarke had a much bleaker start in life, in a Nazi death camp in Austria.

Her mother, Anka Bergman, a Czech Jew, had been in the early stages of pregnancy when she arrived at Auschwitz in October 1944, but escaped the watchful eye of the infamous SS Dr Josef Mengele, who awaited new arrivals to carry out selections which could mean life or death. Pregnant women suffered the latter fate.

Anka was sent from Auschwitz to a slave labour camp at Freiberg later that month, where many prisoners were worked to death. As the Allies closed in, in April 1945, she and nearly 1,000 other women, and a few men, were loaded into open topped wagons on a train.

Now, weighing less than five stones and at full term (Anka had luckily been given baggy clothes which hid her pregnancy), they arrived at the most notorious death camp of Mauthausen, where she was thrown onto a farmer’s cart on top of the sick, diseased and dying. That is where she gave birth to Eva.

When the cart stopped at the infirmary, a prisoner-doctor cut the umbilical cord, smacked the baby’s bottom and wrapped it in newspaper, while Anka was helped to a stinking bunk, which she knew was far superior to the conditions the other prisoners would have endured.

Unbeknown to her, two other women who’d been on the train had also given birth, and their babies, each weighing less than three pounds, had also survived. Their fathers, however, and many of their wider family, had been murdered by the Nazis.

Priska Lowenbeinova gave birth at Freiberg munitions factory to Hana, while Rachel Friedman had her son, Mark, on the cramped, disease-ridden train.

Amazingly, after the war, the three mothers went on to live long lives without much ill health, and enjoyed grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Then, at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, Eva, Hana and Mark met for the first time, becoming ‘siblings of the heart’.

“That was pretty emotional,” Eva recalls. “Having found each other via the American Army Veterans website and the internet, then arranging to meet, we sat in a cafe the whole afternoon either laughing or crying and just telling our mothers’ stories.”

Their story is charted in harrowing detail by bestselling author and journalist Wendy Holden, a former war correspondent who visited numerous concentration camps and spoke to many people, both survivors and historians, to gain a true picture of this terrifying period in history.

Holden, who found Eva during the course of her research, recalls their first meeting.

“I asked if she would do me the great honour of allowing me to write her mother’s story and she reached out, touched my arm and said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you for 70 years’.

“I thought her story was unique, until she happened upon the other two babies whose mothers had gone on the same journey and who had also survived miraculously. They felt an instant connection. I felt that I had to encompass all three stories into one volume, even though the mothers had never met or known about each other.”

Mauthausen, near Hitler’s birthplace, was one of only two Grade Three concentration camps. “Grade Three being the most serious,” explains Holden. “Nobody there was ever intended to leave. Their papers were marked ‘Not to be returned’.”

Luck played a big part in the women’s survival – not the least because the gas chambers were dismantled, or the Zyklon B gas ran out, the day before the three women arrived.

“Rachel and Mark were herded into the gas chamber, nothing happened, and then they were herded out again,” says Holden.

Hana, now a biochemist who lives in California, and Mark, a doctor,who settled in Wisconsin, have recently been reunited with Eva at Mauthausen, where the book has been launched, to be printed in 18 different languages.

Eva gives talks to schools about the Holocaust within her work for charities, including the Holocaust Educational Trust and Anne Frank Trust.

She doesn’t know the extent of the psychological impact her mother suffered as a result of her experiences, but they did talk about what happened.

“When we came to this country, because I didn’t have any aunts or uncles or cousins around the place, I began asking my mother about her family and her life growing up. She would tell me in tiny snippets of her wartime experiences, as and when she felt I could cope with the details.”

Anka, whose first husband Bernd Nathan – a German Jew – was shot by the Nazis, went on to marry Karel Bergman, a Czech interpreter who had worked in Britain.

They later came to Cardiff as refugees. Anka died two years ago, aged 96.

n Born Survivors by Wendy Holden (Sphere, £18.99).