December 10, 2025 
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What does it mean to come into the world in a place built for death?
In April 1945, as the Nazi regime crumbled, a starving and skeletal Anka Bergman went into labour on the back of an open coal wagon at the gates of Mauthausen—one of the most brutal concentration camps in Europe. Her daughter, Eva Clarke, survived against every imaginable odd, becoming one of only three babies ever known to be born alive in the camp.
Today, Eva’s existence is itself an act of defiance—a living testament to courage, chance, and a mother’s refusal to give up.
Caption: Eva Clarke’s parents, Anka and Bernd Nathan, are shown here on their wedding day, May 15, 1940. They were taken prisoner and put in concentration camps, just because they were Jewish. They spent three years at Terezin, until the end of September 1944, when Eva’s father was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The next day, her mother volunteered to go and be with him, but she never saw him again. She later found out that he’d been shot dead Jan. 18, 1945, just one week before the Russian army liberated the concentration camp there. (Courtesy photo)
Anka and her husband Bernd married in Prague in May 1940, already under Nazi occupation. As Jews, their fate was sealed early. They were among the first groups deported to Terezín (Theresienstadt), a ghetto-camp the Nazis presented as a “model settlement” but which functioned as a site of overcrowding, starvation, and death.
Remarkably, Anka and Bernd survived there for three years—an unusually long period in a system designed to break people quickly. Work kept them alive. Luck, as Anka always emphasized, did the rest.
In 1943, Anka discovered she was pregnant. In a place built to annihilate an entire people, pregnancy was considered an act of defiance and was punished by death. Anka and four other pregnant women were forced to sign declarations agreeing that their newborns would be killed—euphemistically described by the Nazis as “euthanasia.”
Her son, George, was born in February 1944. He died of pneumonia two months later—an unbearable loss that, paradoxically, saved Anka’s life. Had she arrived in Auschwitz holding an infant, both mother and child would have been sent directly to the gas chamber.
When Bernd was deported to Auschwitz, Anka volunteered to join him, unaware of the camp’s true nature. Upon arrival, she endured the notorious selection lines, stood before Josef Mengele, had her hair shaved, and was assigned a number.
The reality of Auschwitz revealed itself instantly: the smell of burning flesh, the chimneys, the smoke, the screams. Anka later called it “Dante’s Inferno.”
She never saw her husband again. After the war, she learned he had been shot during a death march on 18 January 1945.
Because Anka was still physically strong—despite years of deprivation—she was transferred to a slave labour camp in Freiburg, where she worked in an armaments factory for six months. During that time, she became visibly pregnant again.
By the time guards noticed, Auschwitz had already been liberated. Sending her back to be killed was no longer possible.
As the Nazis retreated, Anka was packed onto an open coal wagon for a 17-day transport to Mauthausen. There was no food, no water, no shelter, and no medical care.
On one stop, a farmer approached the wagon. Horrified by the sight of an emaciated, pregnant woman, he handed her a glass of milk. A guard raised his whip—then inexplicably lowered it, allowing her to accept the drink. She believed that act saved her life.
When the train finally reached Mauthausen, Anka saw the camp’s name and understood instantly what it meant; unlike Auschwitz, she had heard of this place. The shock triggered her labour.
She weighed just 35 kilograms. She gave birth alone, surrounded by corpses and dying prisoners, believing she would not survive the hour. But she did. So did her newborn daughter.
Eva Clarke entered the world in a place designed to kill her.
On 5 May 1945—nine days after Eva’s birth—the U.S. Army liberated Mauthausen. American medics warned survivors to eat slowly; some prisoners died from consuming food too quickly. Anka, who spoke fluent English, translated the warnings for others.
There were no baby clothes. Eva was initially wrapped in scraps of paper.
Survivors of Mauthausen cheer American soldiers as they pass through the main gate of the camp. The photograph was taken several days after the liberation of the camp. Mauthausen, Austria, May 9, 1945.
When Anka regained enough strength, she returned to Prague, where she learned the full magnitude of her loss: 15 close family members, including her parents, sisters, and nephew, had been murdered. Only one cousin survived.
For three years, she lived with that cousin—her first real sense of family after the war. In 1948, Anka remarried a Czech Jewish man who had fled to the UK before the war and served in the RAF. Together they left communist Czechoslovakia and settled in Britain, where Eva grew up.
For more than two decades, Eva Clarke has spoken publicly about her mother’s resilience and about the forces—chance, timing, small mercies—that determined who lived and who died.
As she often reminds audiences, people struggle to comprehend six million deaths. But they can understand one family. One mother. One newborn child.
Her message is simple and urgent: treat people with dignity, resist hatred, refuse to be a bystander, and remember that every victim of the Holocaust was an individual, not a statistic.
And above all, remember the courage of a mother who protected life in the heart of a death camp.
You can watch the full interview with eva here
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