Members of Freshwater Bay WI heard an extraordinary story of survival last week, as Holocaust survivor Eva Clarke shared her powerful life story with a packed audience.
Eva was born in April 1945 at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, just days before it was liberated by Allied forces. Her mother, Anka, went into labour weighing just 5st, after a harrowing 17-day journey in a packed, filthy rail truck with no food and minimal water.
The trauma of arriving at the notorious death camp triggered Anka’s labour. Both mother and baby would likely have been killed, but the camp’s gas chambers had shut down just one day earlier. The camp was liberated within the week.
Eva Clarke, who has been awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) for her work with the Holocaust Educational Trust, spoke of how her Jewish parents had survived years in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia before being deported to Auschwitz.
Her mother was later sent to a slave labour camp near Dresden, where she was forced to make Doodlebugs – German V-1 flying bombs. Her father, Bernd, an architect, was executed in Auschwitz, never knowing his wife had survived or that he had a daughter. A previous child of theirs had died of pneumonia in Theresienstadt at just 2 months old.
Eva’s story, and that of two other children born in Nazi concentration camps, is told in the award-winning book Born Survivors by Wendy Holden. Her family’s experiences also feature in the documentary The Baby Born in a Concentration Camp.
The Freshwater audience listened in silence as Eva recounted the suffering, courage and resilience of her family, and the importance of continuing to remember and educate future generations.
