I was born in Auschwitz in a train of dead bodies… I was meant to die & only survived because Nazis ran out of gas
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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. 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.
![[Holocaust survivor Eva Clarke.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/1945-15-members-family-murdered-964278027.jpg?strip=all&w=779)
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.
![[Sepia-toned photo of a mother and her baby, the mother a Holocaust survivor born in a Nazi death camp.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/i-born-nazi-death-camp-632684570.jpg?strip=all&w=615)
The other members of Eva’s family who died in Auschwitz were three grandparents, uncles, aunts and her cousin Peter, seven. 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.
![[Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with train tracks and discarded items in the foreground.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/entrance-german-concentration-camp-auschwitz-550752601.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
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.
![[Sepia-toned wedding photo of a young couple.]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/i-born-nazi-death-camp-632684568.jpg?strip=all&w=615)
