‘My mother was saved because the gas for the chambers had run out. I was a miracle baby’

Eva Clarke, 75, is the youngest Holocaust survivor in the UK, having been born in a concentration camp in 1945

I was born in Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. My mother Anka Bergman had been in camps for three and a half years, including Auschwitz, and then was put on a train in coal wagons for 17 days, with no food and little water. By this time she was almost nine months pregnant, and didn’t know the train’s destination until she saw the sign and realised it was the notorious Mauthausen death camp – the shock sent her into labour.

Anka was saved by the fact that the supply of gas for the gas chambers had run out the day before my birth. A week later the Americans liberated the camp. So I was a miracle baby. It turned out there were three of us – all born in the most dire of circumstances: one in the Freiberg slave labour camp, one on the train, and I was born at the gates of Mauthausen. All three mothers and babies survived, but none of the fathers.

The mothers weighed no more than five stone at full term and none of the babies weighed more than three pounds. Incredibly, my mother was able to feed me, but what is so poignant is that as soon as we came back to civilisation three weeks later, the milk just disappeared.

My father, Bernd Nathan, an architect, was shot in Auschwitz a week before its liberation on 27 January 1945. My mother was told about this soon after the end of the war. Very few members of her family had survived, but fortunately a cousin had and we

Above lived with her in Prague for three years. In 1948 my mother married my stepfather Karel Bergman and we moved to Cardiff, where he had been offered a job.

Because I didn’t have any extended family growing up, I was always asking my mother about her life, and interspersed with ordinary family stories, she would tell me about her wartime experiences. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that the tragedy of what had happened to our family began to register.

My mother died in 2013, aged 96. A few years before, I had tracked down the other two ‘babies’ whose mothers were also on that train. I found them via the internet and the American Army Veterans Association.

Below

Hana was born in the Freiburg slave labour camp on 12 April – her mother hid her in her ragged dress – and Mark was born on the coal wagon on 20 April. Amazingly, we are all healthy, physically and mentally. Hana lives in California and Mark in Wisconsin.

None of the mothers knew about one another. I finally met

Hana and Mark in Mauthausen at the 65th commemoration of the liberation in 2010. We were all only children, but we feel like siblings now.

The following year they came to my home in Cambridge to meet my mother. Both their mothers had died – of old age – and they had so many questions to ask. They walked into the house and my mother said, ‘You’re my children…’ It was so moving, we were all in tears.

My mother had a very positive attitude to life, which helped her to cope throughout the war and subsequently. She didn’t want to be only identified as a Holocaust survivor. She would say, ‘I was a wife, a mother, a grandmother and a great grandmother.’

I became a teacher and married Malcolm Clarke, a law professor at Cambridge. We have two sons, Tim, 48, and Nick, 45. I started telling my story a long time ago at the college where I was working. Over the past 20 years, I have spoken all over the UK, and occasionally overseas. My mother said it was a relief that she didn’t have to do it any more – she was interviewed hundreds of times. She once said to me, ‘There might not always be this level of interest,’ but I replied by saying I thought racism and prejudice were not going to go away. — Interview by Jessamy Calkin 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day.

Eva Clarke’s story is featured in Portraits for Posterity: Photographs of Holocaust Survivors in Great Britain by Matt Writtle, £35 (mattwrittle.com/shop)

The liberation of Mauthausen death camp in 1945. Eva and her mother