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, 79, was born at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on April 29 , one day after it ran out of gas for the gas chamber.
The couple married in May 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 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'.
She had to go and ask somebody what it meant,' Ms Clarke added. Her brother was born at the camp in February 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 their luck ran out, because it was on that day my father was sent to Auschwitz. Her mother, Anka Nathan Bergman, volunteered to follow her husband the next day because she had 'no idea' where he had been sent, Ms Clarke added.
Of her brother, Ms Clarke said: 'His death meant my life and my mother's life, because had my mother arrived in the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp holding my brother in her arms, they would have both been sent straight to the gas chamber.
