Woman born at gates of Nazi concentration camp survived because of ‘luck’
Woman born at gates of Nazi concentration camp survived because of ‘luck’
Share:
A woman who was born at the gates of a concentration camp after her mother volunteered to follow her husband to Auschwitz has said she survived because of “luck”. Eva Clarke, 80, was born at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on April 29 1945, one day after it ran out of gas for the gas chamber.
Ms Clarke’s father Bernd Nathan, who was German and Jewish, met her mother when he travelled to Prague to escape the Nazis. The couple married in May 1940 and were among the first people to be sent to Theresienstadt labour camp as they were “young, strong and well able to work”, Ms Clarke said.
Speaking to the PA news agency before Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, she said the pair managed to survive in the camp for three years, a “remarkably long” period of time. Despite men and women being separated at the camp, her parents managed to meet and her mother became pregnant with Ms Clarke’s brother.
The Nazis considered becoming pregnant in a concentration camp a crime punishable by death, Ms Clarke said, adding that they made her parents sign a document saying when the baby was born they would be handed over for “euthanasia”. “My mother never heard the word euthanasia. She had to go and ask somebody what it meant,” Ms Clarke added.
Her brother was born at the camp in February 1944 but died two months later of pneumonia. Of her and her mother’s survival, Ms Clarke said: “My mother always said luck had an awful lot to do with it, but at the end of September of 1944 their luck ran out, because it was on that day my father was sent to Auschwitz.”.
