Discover this podcast and so much more

Podcasts are free to enjoy without a subscription. We also offer ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more for just $11.99/month.

I was born in a Nazi concentration camp

I was born in a Nazi concentration camp

FromFrom the Library With Love


I was born in a Nazi concentration camp

FromFrom the Library With Love

ratings:
Length:
52 minutes
Released:
Oct 20, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

The strikingly handsome couple looked like they’d stepped straight out of a Hollywood motion picture from the glamorous golden era. The reality was somewhat different.Anka and Bernd met in Nazi occupied Prague, in 1940 and it was love at first sight across a crowded nightclub. Like it was for so many young couples in wartime a whirlwind courtship ensued followed by a wedding. In December 1941, Anka and Bernd were amongst the first transports sent to Terezin, the first camp in Czechoslovakia where they remained for three years. During their time at Terezin, and despite the sexes being segregated, Anka became pregnant with a son. When the Nazis discovered this they were forced to sign a document stating that when the baby was born, it would have to be handed over to the Gestapo to be murdered. In the event, her baby son died of pneumonia two months after his birth.Anka fell pregnant again and this time tried her hardest to keep her pregnancy a secret, knowing full well what would happen should her SS captors discover it.Soon after she fell pregnant, Bernd was deported to Auschwitz in Sept 1944. Heartbreakingly Anka followed him. She was the eternal optimist and thought that as they had survived that long nothing could get any worse…Anka was at Auschwitz for ten days, a time she described as being like ‘Dante’s Inferno, hell on earth.’ Being young and fit, she was sent to work in a factory near Dresden as slave labour, never to see her husband again. By the spring of 1945 the Germans were retreating and evacuating concentration and slave labour camps. Anka, by now looking like, in her words, ‘a scarcely living pregnant skeleton’ was transported on a filthy open coal wagon to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, a horrendous journey that took seventeen days. She weighed 5 stone. So horrified was she to see that she had arrived at yet another concentration camp she immediately went into labour. It’s hard to conceive of the following scene. Anka, surrounded by the dead and dying, giving birth in the squalor of a coal wagon. An SS guard walked past and noticed. ‘Carry on screaming,’ he told her. Baby Eva came into a cruel world weighing just 3 pounds. Anka attributed her and her baby daughter’s survival to luck and timing. The day before she gave birth the Nazis ran out of Zyklon B gas. The day after she gave birth Hitler committed suicide. Soon after Mauthausen was liberated by the Americans.Returning to Prague with her tiny newborn baby girl, Anka stayed with relatives who had also survived the Holocaust. To her devastation she discovered her husband, parents, and two sisters had been murdered at Auschwitz.  Bernd was shot dead near Auschwitz in January 1945, just one week before the camp was liberated. He never knew his wife had fallen pregnant again.Anka met Karel Bergman, a Czech who had fought with the RAF during the war, and moved to Cardiff in 1948 to start a new life.  78 years on, Eva shares her astonishing story. Please be warned, there are some distressing scenes described in this episode.This is one of the most emotional interviews I’ve done. It reveals not only the depth of the atrocities committed in some of the foulest spots on earth,  but also that life hung on chance, degrees of fate, turn left, turn right, a flick of the whip. Buried within this story are also tiny fragments of humanity that have the power to change a life.How I wish I’d met Eva’s extraordinary mother Anka who lived to 96 years old and never tired of telling her daughter ‘You don’t know what you can withstand until you are put to the test.’
Released:
Oct 20, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (42)

Librarians, bestselling authors and our wartime generation sharing their love of books, reading and some extraordinary stories . #Hidden History #Forgotten women #Bibliotherapy #LibrariesINTRODUCTIONWelcome to From the Library With Love. A podcast for anyone whose life has been changed by reading. I’m Kate Thompson. Wonderful, transformative things happen when you set foot in a library. In 2019 I uncovered the true story of a forgotten Underground library, built along the tracks of a Tube tunnel during the Blitz. As stories go, it was irresistible and the result was, The Little Wartime Library, my seventh novel.Bethnal Green Public Library, where the novel is set was 100 years old in October 2022, and to celebrate the centenary of this grand old lady, funded by library philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, I set myself the challenge of interviewing 100 library workers. Speaking with one library worker for every year this library has been serving its community seemed a good way to mark this auspicious occasion. Because who better to explain the worth of a hundred-year-old library, than librarians themselves!I wanted to explore the enduring value of libraries and reading. I quickly realised that librarians have the best stories. My research led me to librarians with over fifty years of experience and MBEs, to the impressive women who manage libraries in prisons and schools, to those in remote Scottish islands. From poetry libraries overlooking the wide sweep of the Thames, to the 16th century Shakespeare’s Library in Stratford, via the small but mighty Leadhills Miners’ Library. This podcast was born out of those eye-opening conversations, because as Denise from Tower Hamlets Library told me: 'If you want to see the world, don't join the Army, become a librarian!'I’ll also be talking to international bestselling authors and some remarkable wartime women about their favourite libraries, stories, the craft of writing and the book that helped them to view the world differently. Come and join me as I delve into the secrets behind the stacks.Podcasts edited by Ben Veasey at media-crews.co.uk Image by Julie Price