Holocaust survivors born in camps honor mothers who defied death

Three Jewish babies entered the world inside the Nazi camp system in April 1945, each carried through deportation in a pregnancy that should have ended in murder. Eva Clarke, Hana Berger-Moran and Mark Olsky survived because their mothers concealed those pregnancies through Auschwitz, forced labor and a collapsing Reich that was running out of time.

Eva Clarke was born on 29 April 1945 in Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, five days before American troops liberated the camp on 5 May. Her mother was among the women sent to Auschwitz in 1944 while newly pregnant, when pregnancy in the camps was effectively a death sentence. Eva and her mother were the only survivors of their family. Fifteen relatives, including grandparents, her father, uncles, aunts and a 7-year-old cousin, were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Hana Berger-Moran was born on 12 April 1945 in Freiberg, a subcamp in Germany. Her mother, Priska Löwenbein, born on 8 June 1916, had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944 while about two months pregnant and managed to conceal her pregnancy. Mark Olsky was born eight days later, on 20 April 1945, on a train carrying more than 1,000 Jewish women to Mauthausen. His mother, Rachel, from Poland, had hidden her pregnancy while imprisoned.

Their births stand out because births in Nazi camps were almost unknown. In Auschwitz and other killing centers, pregnant women and mothers of small children were often sent directly to gas chambers or otherwise marked for death as unfit for labor. The three children lived only through concealment, timing and luck, at the very end of a system built to erase them before they could be born.

Mauthausen itself embodied that brutality. Around 190,000 people were imprisoned there and in its subcamps, and at least 90,000 died. Imperial War Museums has described Eva Clarke as one of only three babies born in Mauthausen who survived past liberation, noting that she was born just after the Nazis destroyed the camp’s gas chambers and less than a week before freedom came.

Now in their 80s, Clarke, Berger-Moran and Olsky carry testimony that is becoming rarer with every passing year. Their survival records not only the cruelty of Nazi policy, but also the last, defiant acts of mothers who kept pregnancies secret long enough to let life begin in a place designed for death.