Authors: Wendy Holden
Born Survivors (51 page)
The bodies of all those buried in the boneyard under the football pitch had been moved and reinterred within a serene walled graveyard in the centre of the camp. And where row upon row of prisoner barracks had once lined the terraces, now stood a well-tended garden dominated by a series of hugely impressive and emotive stone and metal monuments to the dead of every
Häftlinge
nation in the camp.
The Czechoslovak memorial and gates where Eva was born
The ‘babies’ walked together down the few steps to the door of the gas chamber with its white-tiled walls and sinister black pipes and could barely speak. Under Nazi ideology, all three of them should have gasped their last in that stifling space, cradled by their half-dead mothers. But Fate had other plans for them all. Brought home from the war, never to meet their fathers, each child had grown up believing that the desperate circumstances of their birth and the miracle of their survival meant that they’d been the only one born into that living hell who could have lived. They were wrong.
One year after their visit to Mauthausen the three ‘siblings of the heart’ met again, this time in England. They travelled to Eva’s hometown of Cambridge in January 2011 to take part in a special commemoration service for Holocaust Memorial Day at the Guildhall. There, Hana and Mark met Anka for the first time. Aged
ninety-three, physically frail but with a lively mind, Eva’s mother was visibly moved to meet the other babies who’d also survived and she embraced them warmly. Hana said, ‘To meet Anka was so very emotional. I only wish she could have met my mother. She told me, “You are my daughter too,” and I really felt like I was.’
Mark agreed. ‘It felt so special. She was such a wonderful lady – so happy and bright and articulate, with a great sense of humour and her memory completely intact.’
It wasn’t long before the ‘babies’ met again, back in Mauthausen on 8 May 2013, where they opened a new exhibition, part of which features the remarkably accurate replica of Hana’s baby smock and bonnet made from the originals loaned to them by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Anka, who had just celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday, wasn’t well enough to travel to Austria with them and passed away two months later. Her funeral in Cambridge was broadcast over the internet so that her grandson and his family in Australia could feel a part of the service of celebration. Hana and Mark – Anka’s surrogate children – watched it online too and were able to say their own quiet farewell to the last surviving mother.
Of blessed memory, those remarkable women had not only found the will to carry on and survive the unsurvivable during the war years, but their fortitude and determination ensured that their infants survived too. Their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives to the full in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.
The ghosts of their mothers and of the millions of others who died during the war demand that their stories are told and retold, never to be forgotten. As Hana said, ‘We all try to live our lives as best we can and to fill those shoes that are so empty. In memory of their memories, each new day is a promise.’
Never far from each other’s thoughts, the miraculous children of Priska, Rachel and Anka – all of them born survivors – were sadly
unable to attend the town of Freiberg’s 2015 commemoration project. Entitled ‘We Are Still Here’, it involved three generations of townspeople and relatives of KZ survivors in a cultural festival featuring Holocaust literature, music, poetry and art, working with local schoolchildren and with exchange students from Freiberg’s twin city of Ness Ziona in Israel.
Three hundred miles south of Freiberg, the ‘babies’ returned instead to the breathtakingly beautiful hilltop site of the Mauthausen Memorial in May 2015 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the liberation.
In the place that was meant to have been their graveyard even as Nazi tyranny was in its death throes, the seventy-year-old orphans tightly gripped each other’s hands and walked together through the gates of the camp in the footsteps of three women who not only survived unimaginable horrors, but who defied death to give them life.
Mark, Eva and Hana take part in the memorial parade at Mauthausen
The three women whose story is at the heart of this book lost more than twenty members of their immediate families to Hitler and his accomplices. Beyond the circles of these once close-knit families the death toll rippled onwards and outwards to encompass grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and in-laws as entire generations and communities were wiped off the face of the earth.
The names and faces of these cherished family members represent a tiny fraction of the millions of the disappeared who perished at the hands of those who presided over life and death.
Many of their names may never be known.
None of these loved ones lie in consecrated ground or have tombstones.
There is no final resting place to mark the brutal manner of their passing.
There is nowhere to go to remember their once-hopeful faces. There is only here …
Husbands and fathers
Tibor Löwenbein (1914–1945)
Monik Friedman (1916–1945)
Bernd Nathan (1904–1945)
Parents
Emanuel Rona (1884–1944)
Paula Ronová (1889–1944)
Shaiah Abramczyk (1870–1944)
Fajga Abramczyk (1898–1944)
Stanislav Kauder (1870–1944)
Ida Kauderová (1882–1944)
Selma Nathanová (1880–1944)
Ita Friedmann (1899–1944)
Siblings
Boežka Ronová (1910–1944)
Moniek Abramczyk (1923–1943)
Heniek Abramczyk (1931–1944)
Dorcka Abramczyk (1931–1944)
David Friedman (dates unknown)
Avner Friedman (dates unknown)
Anička ‘Maniusia’ Abramczyk (1933–1944)
Zdena Isidorová (1904–1944)
Herbert Isidor (1916–1944)
Ruzena Mautnerová (1906–1944)
Children
Peter Mautner (1935–1944)
Dan Nathan (February–April 1944)
‘No day shall erase you from the memory of Time.’
Virgil
Author research and previously unpublished sources:
Author interviews with Holocaust survivors Hana Berger Moran, Mark Olsky, Eva Clarke, Sally Wolkoff, Gerty Meltzer, Esther Bauer, Lisa Miková, Esther Bauer, Werner Reich, Max R. Garcia, and Bronia Snow.
Author interviews with survivors’ families Charlie Olsky, Shirley Speyer, Jana Zimmer, Brian K. Petersohn, Jean Gore, Larry Kosiek, Stephanie Sullivan, Julie K. Rosenberg, David Feder, Miki Feder, and John Tygier.
Author research visits to Krakow, Auschwitz I and II, Łódź, Pabianice, Chełmno, Prague, Terezín, Horní Bříza, Trebechovice pod Orebem, Zlaty Moravce, Hradec Králové, Drevikov, Bratislava, Sered’, Freiberg, Linz, Most, Plzeň České Budějovice, and KZ Mauthausen.
Documents and photographs from historian Dr Michael Düsing, and author interviews with him and with Cornelia Hünert of Freiberg’s City Cultural Department, Germany.
Author interviews with Pascal Cziborra of the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology at the University of Bielefeld, Germany.
Author interviews with the Horní Bříza Deputy Mayor Zdeněk Procházka, his daughter Michaela, the late historian Mrs
Bozena Royová, and locals Jaroslav Lang and Vaclav Stepanek, Czech Republic.
Author interview with Dita Valentová in Třebechovice pod Orebem, Czech Republic.
Author interview with Martin Winstone of the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum, Nottinghamshire, UK.
Author interview with midwife Abby Davidson, Bsc (Hons), London.
Unpublished personal account of Anka Bergman’s experiences written for her daughter Eva Clarke, 2009.
Unpublished personal account of Klara Löffová’s experiences written for her daughter Jana Zimmer, 2000.
Unpublished letter detailing her experiences from Priska Lomová to the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters, 1990.
Unpublished letters between Tibor Löwenbein and his wife Priska, 1941.
Interviews with Anka Bergman by Frances Rapport, Professor of Qualitative Health Research Interview, Swansea University, Wales, 2007.
Unpublished survivors’ letters, railway and official documents, and photographs with permission from the Museum of Horní Bříza, Czech Republic.
Documents and photographs with permission from the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, Poland and author interviews with Wojciech Płosa, Ph.D., Head of the Archives, Dr Piotr Setkiewicz, Ph.D., Head of the Research Department, and memorial guide Anna Ren.
Documents and photographs with permission from the Jewish Museum of Prague, Czech Republic, and author interviews with archivists Julie Jenšovská and Radana Rutová.
Archive witness statements:
Lomová, Priska, Interview 15134. Web 2014.
Visual History Archive
. USC Shoah Foundation (
sfi.usc.edu
)
Olsky, Rachel, Interview 15161. Web 2014.
Visual History Archive
. USC Shoah Foundation (
sfi.usc.edu
)
Bergman, Anna, Interview 28239. Web 2013
Visual History Archive
. USC Shoah Foundation (
sfi.usc.edu
)
Wolkoff, Sally, Interview 12886. Web 2014.
Visual History Archive
. USC Shoah Foundation (
sfi.usc.edu
)
Meltzer, Gerty, Interview 1686. Web 2014.
Visual History Archive
. USC Shoah Foundation (
sfi.usc.edu
)
Freeman, Abraham, Interview 16384. Web 2014.
Visual History Archive
. USC Shoah Foundation (
sfi.usc.edu
)
Filmed interview with Anka Bergman by Jean Laurent Grey and Solomon J. Salat for the Mauthausen Memorial
The Baby Born in a Concentration Camp
, BBC documentary, producer Emily Davis, 2011
Defiant Requiem: Voices of Resistance
, PBS documentary director Doug Schultz, 2012
Nazi Propaganda Film About Theresienstadt/Terezin
. Film ID 2310, Steven Spielberg Film & Video Archive
Liberation of Mauthausen
(and KZ Gusen I, II & III) by Former Staff Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek. Published in:
Thunderbolt
, the 11th Armored Division Association, Vol. 8, No. 7, May–June 1955, with permission of his son Larry Kosiek
Interview with Priska Lomová by editor Eva Richterová in
Bojovník
newspaper, part of the Sväz Protifašistických Bojovníkov, 1980
Interview with Anka Bergman by Helga Amesberger for the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project, 2003.
Bibliography:
A Time to Speak
, Helen Lewis, The Blackstaff Press, 1992
After the Holocaust
, Marek Jan Chodakiewiczs, Columbia University Press, 2003
Against All Hope
:
Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1938–1945
, Hermann Langbein
All Hell Let Loose, The World at War 1939–45
, Max Hastings, Harper Press, 2011
