Eva Clarke, The Woman Who Was Born In a Nazi Death Camp.

Eva Clarke,the woman who was born in a Concentration Camp

Her mother Anka Bergman, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1917, on the 20th of April, coincidentally the same birth date as Adolf Hitler. In about 1936 (aged 18), she was studying law at the Prague Charles University. 

Eva Clarke’s father was a German of Jewish descent. He fled to Prague when Hitler rose to power in hopes of escaping the regime and that is where he met the lovely Anka Bergman, Eva’s mother. They met at a nightclub where Anka was with her group of friends. Eva describes her mother’s acquaintance with her father as being pure love at first sight. 

In 1939 that the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. They began to impose new rules on all Jews which constrained their freedom even further. A very highly valued piece of evidence of this from the specific perspective of life as a Jew at the time is that found in The Diary of a Young Girl- Anne Frank’s diary. In her diary she had written about numerous rules and things they no longer were allowed to do. 

A picture of the little girl, Anne Frank

As derived from her diary, here are some examples of what all Jews were not allowed to do:

After May 1940 the good times were few and far between: first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use street-cars; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3 and 5 P.M.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty parlors; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8 P.M. and 6 A.M.; Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, movies or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields; Jews were forbidden to go rowing; Jews were forbidden to take part in any athletic activity in public; Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8 P.M.; Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes; Jews were required to attend Jewish schools, etc. You couldn't do this and you couldn't do that, but life went on. Jacque always said to me, "I don't dare do anything anymore, 'cause I'm afraid it's not allowed."

Anka, like many others at the time, would try going against these restrictions and once decided to go to the Cinema anyways. On this account, the Gestapo walked in and began going through rows checking people’s ID’s. Luckily, they stopped the row before Anka’s and she managed to leave the Cinema unharmed and undetected. Due to the severity of the brutal discrimination that they’d been through, most Jews emigrated to other countries, however, this was just the minority. The majority of them remained in the country under intense living conditions. 

In accordance to Hitler’s following tasks in 1941, the Nazis began to transport all Jews to a concentration camp called Terezin. Roughly thousands were taken there along with Anka and her family, including Jews from other European countries. Terezin was mainly a transit camp, for Western Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination groups. Notably, those too weak to work under the strict conditions of the camp, were immediately transported to Auschwitz. Anka goes on to explain that at the start, they were all going by the ‘old thought’; ‘it isn’t too bad and we can take it.’ The Nazi soldiers replied to this by taking about fifteen young men and hanging them for trying to smuggle letters to their loved ones. 

Terezin Concentration camp in the Czech Republic

Living arrangements at Terezin were to force both men and women to live in separate barracks despite all odds, Anka still managed to meet her husband and also even get pregnant. At the time, this was, as she phrases it, ‘the biggest sin one could commit because of the segregation of sexes. To be Jewish and to be pregnant was a serious crim under the Nazi regime which had devastating consequences. Once caught, they were forced to sign a paper which stated their babies were to be euthanized. On that occasion, the children were born and somehow not euthanized but sadly Anka’s son later died of Pneumonia. By late September of 1944, Anka was yet again pregnant for the second time. Her husband was already taken away and so she hadn’t managed to tell him. Her husband Bernd, was sent to Auschwitz. The Germans allowed volunteers to Auschwitz in order to see their loved ones in a different walled ghetto. Unfortunately, Anka never saw him again. Eva explains that soon after the war had ended, a witness told her mother that Eva’s father had been executed by gun on the 18th of January of 1945. It is heartbreaking to also include that he never knew of his wife being pregnant again and so he never knew he’d have Eva.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/efaef2_ac2f8f6d2cb7438baf2f961ce9c1765b/360p/mp4/file.mp4

Throughout Anka’s heavily endured five years of Nazi cruelty, there existed the gas chambers and the crematoria where people were killed with poison gas. The carried out experiments included Zyklon B–a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in early 1920. Ironically, it was the work of a Jewish Chemist by the name of Fritz Haber that led to the development of the Chemical formula in question. It proved the quickest gassing method and was chosen as the means of mass murder in Auschwitz. 

In 1944, their heads were shaven and they were stripped of their clothes then taken to showers where they were forced to wash in cold water and only that. They remained clotheless for some time, a vicious and inhumane form of direct brutal and cruel exploitation and shame. They were terrified and lived in constant fear and distress. During that cold winter, they were handed rags and taken to barracks. The only closest form of assumption they could ever come to was that, yes, they were burning people there, hence, the constant released smoke rising out of the chimneys and the constant smell of death. 

Anka’s words stand out as she says ‘everyone stopped looking human somehow’. 

The Nazis carried out assessments and debated on who would get to live and who would be killed. Naturally, those whose health was better than others’ were selected to live as they were seen as the most fit for survival of their intense conditions. A point of tremendous importance to add here is that generally, women were mostly always sent to the gas chambers right away. Luckily enough for her, Anka was not detected and selected to live.  The punishment to anyone in her disposition would mean a type of immediate extermination. They then were given better clothes and put on a train that transported them to an armament factory. It is here where she’s spend the next six months working on the notorious Doodlebug.

Her impeccable will to live despite seeing people being divided and taken into gas chambers every single day, not excluding the fact that she was also pregnant, is nothing short of unyielding self-potential and self-strength.

At the end of January of 1945, Auschwitz had finally been liberated by the Russians. The Nazis then started evacuating all camps and factories and annihilating all witnesses to the Holocaust which, once again, put Anka on a train headed away from the approaching allies. Throughout the long train ride which lasted about three weeks, many had lost their lives to hunger. Once they arrived at their destination, Mauthausen death camp in Austria, Anka went into labour. She was in desperate need of help and not even a fellow prisoner who was a Russian doctor bothered to offer any form of help. At the time of her active labour, she’d given birth to baby Eva and after ten minutes, they called a Gynecologist prisoner who helped cut the umbilical cord. It was pronounced that the baby girl she’d given birth to was healthy. 

The harsh reality of all this is that Eva was actually born at a very, very wrong time for it was the time the Nazis were getting rid of all victims and witnesses to their crimes against humanity. Thousands had been shot, gassed and starved to death. Both Anka and Eva were on their way to the gas chamber at Mauthausen. 

This photo was taken on 6th May, a day after the liberation of Mauthausen

On the 5th of May, 1945, Mauthausen death camp was liberated by American troops; a platoon of twenty-three men from the 11th Armored Division of the US Third Army, led by Staff Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek. The following was written by Louis Haefliger, the Red Cross representative, from the book ‘The 186 Steps’:

During the following days I talked with Ziereis about the exact situation prevailing in the camp: lack of bread, clothing, shoes and a dreadful shortage of linens. The camp at Mauthausen was overcrowded, and the camps of Gusen I and II filled beyond human limits. There were as many as five sick men to a narrow camp bed. There were sixty thousand human beings - men, women and children. Ziereis no longer knew where to turn...He speeded up the work of annihilation as much as he could. The Krematorium chimney smoked day and night. The sanitary conditions were at the lowest imaginable level. They were dying of hunger. Ziereis made believe that he was touched by this himself. He put on a self-pitying air, this man with whom I had to take my meals, this monster who once had a truck full of cadavers driven in front of his wife's window, to boast about his work.

…

At the stroke of noon, May 5, 1945, all the SS had been disarmed, as well as the Volksstrum militia and the reinforcements of Vienna firemen. Chaos prevailed in the camp. The prisoners invaded the kitchens and pillaged the Kommandantur. The men rigged themselves out in several pairs of pants and fought over the tins of food. There was an unimaginable turbulence. Suddenly freed, these prisoners behaved like a horde of savages. It took some time to get the camp to calm down a bit. I thought about my own belongings in my room. Everything had disappeared: trunk, clothing, linens.

Once well and fully able to, they returned to Prague. 

Anka stated the following when recalling the moment she’d arrived back home:

‘I came from a big family and there was nobody, nothing. I didn’t know where my next meal will come from because I had no money, no clothes and a little baby.’

She then suspected if any of her relatives had survived the Holocaust, it would probably be her own cousin and she was right. Once she arrived, she found her family waiting for her and her baby girl, she stayed with her family from thereon. 

The devastation of the war took many lives but those that survived came to learn that neither did their homes or personal belongings survive. Everything and almost everyone was dead. This led many to take their own lives.

A for Anka, she re-married in 1948 and moved to Britain where she lived in the company of her daughter, two grandsons and three great grand-children. Anka passed away in July 2013.

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