Prague, Oct 3 (CTK) – British writer Wendy Holden presented her book about three young women, Holocaust survivors, who gave birth to their babies in a concentration camp and the three offspring, Eva, Mark and Hana, now aged 71 years, who travelled with her to Prague, in the Vaclav Havel Library on Monday.
Holden said apart from the three “children,” the Prague Jewish Museum had helped her write the book “Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance and Hope” (2015).
The book is now available in a Czech translation.
Three years ago, Holden tracked down Eva Clark living in Britain and found out that she had been born in a concentration camp. Her mother was a Czech woman named Anka.
The writer gradually met another two people with the same fate as Eva, Hana Lomova-Moran and Marek Olsky. Their mothers Priska and Rachel came from Slovakia and Poland.
During her research for the book, Holden visited the Terezin (Theresienstadt) former wartime internment camp for European Jews in north Bohemia as well as the concentration camps Auschwitz in Poland and Mauthausen in Austria where the women with their new-born babies survived till the end of the war.
She also went to the places where the mothers were buried in Drevikov, east Bohemia, Bratislava and Nashville, USA.
All the three women became pregnant with their husbands who did not survive the Holocaust.
In concentration camps, they kept their pregnancy secret. It was possible since they wore loose outfits and were undernourished, weighing only some 35 kilos even during the last phase of pregnancy.
They all went through Auschwitz and at the end of the war, they met in the Freiberg labour camp. During the train transport to Mauthausen, they survived thanks to courageous inhabitants of Horni Briza, west Bohemia, who brought water and food for the exhausted and freezing inmates on the train.
The babies were born during the transport just a few days one after another.
