“I would've given up at the first hurdle. I would've collapsed. [My mother] said, ‘You have no idea.’ She said, ‘You just don't know what you can withstand until you have to…. Fortunately, most people are not tested,’” says Eva Clarke, describing how her mother went into labor as she arrived at the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen in April 1945. Her mother, Anka, was in labor as she climbed off a coal truck and onto a cart – all without help. “She remembers looking back, you look down onto the River Danube. It was April, so there were blossoms and birds singing. And she said she thought it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. And she also thought it would be the last thing that she'd ever see,” recalls author Wendy Holden, who wrote about Bergman and two other Holocaust survivors who remarkably gave birth as Nazi prisoners. But it wasn’t the last thing she’d see, for a stunning reason: the last day the gas chambers at Mauthausen were used was the day before. Anka and her da...
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