Eva Clarke story - Remembering the Holocaust
January 23 2008
By Anne Palmer


The moving personal story of Eva Clarke the youngest survivor of the Holocaust has touched the heart strings of hundreds of school pupils and members of the public across Northern Ireland this week.
Eva also travelled to Fermanagh County Museum to share her story, at an event to coincide with other international Holocaust memorial events to encourage people to 'Imagine, Remember, Reflect, React'.
She recalled details of the hardship experienced by Jewish people during WWII, and drew parallels with modern-day racism and genocide in places such as Rwanda or Kosovo.
"Hearing another person's story makes it come alive," she said.
Audiences heard the remarkable real life event of her birth, weighing just 3lbs on a train, which had travelled from Auschwitz-Birkenau and arrived at Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945.
Eva's mother, Anka Bergman 23, was a law student in Prague when Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Bernd Nathan, her father, a German-Jewish architect, was shot at Auschwitz on January 18, 1945 a week before Liberation, but never knew Anka was pregnant. Eva related how her mother escaped being sent to the gas chambers, and survived the Dresden bombings and the horrors of concentration camp life. She recalled how sadly how most of her relatives at the camps perished, despite her aunt having sent a post card with a coded message, using the Hebrew word for bread, to let her cousin know they were starving.
Her mother said a glass of milk from a kind farmer, while she was on route to Mauthausen, saved her life. Her mother described her self at that time as "a scarcely living pregnant skeleton," she said.
On that three week coal- train journey there was no food, nor water, and dead bodies were thrown out where the train stopped in the countryside.
After the war years, having spent time in Prague, they came to live in Cardiff with her mum and step-father Karel Bergman in 1948 as refugees and asylum seekers.
Eva said: "I tell my story first of all for reasons of commemoration to remember all the millions of people killed in the Holocaust, and to remember all the millions who never had one single person remember them," she said.
She said she wants to tell her story to enable everyone to lean the lessons of the Holocaust, but she said we are not doing so well, when we still have people dying Cambodia; Bosnia, Rwanda; Darfur and Sudan.
The other reason I tell my story is to try to counteract racism, she said.
"What happened to my family, happened because we were Jewish," she said.
Her family had one brush with anti-semitism, when they came to live in Britain in the 1950s, when her father was given to understand that he would not be welcome. Eva described that experience as "minor but shocking".
Reflecting on her fascinating story of timing, chance and luck, she said:
"I feel myself to be extremely fortunate, my mother is not bitter. I do not come from a religious background, so that is why my mother calls it luck. This is why I'm called the miracle baby," she said.
She said he mother who is now aged 90, would not wish to speak to any German of the age group, who might have been involved in the Holocaust and if someone was guilty of war crimes she would like to see them brought to justice and to confront their crime, but would not blame young Germans for what had happened.
Eva grew up to have three German boyfriends during her life.
While her own father had been Jewish, he was also German, she said.
She is encouraging young people from Northern Ireland to talk to their families about their own story.
"If you don't ask questions, all that oral history will disappear," she said.
In the audience, Doreen Morrison, from Enniskillen said she had been impressed by Eva's experience.
"It is good to hear it and we should all remember," she said.
Ruth Young, from Enniskillen, said she found it humbling, and is delighted Eva wants to share her story with young people today.
"I was amazed there was no bitterness," she said.
" It was really emotional, You don't really realise what it was like, until, some one tells you in person about it," said Jordan Somerville, Portora Royal School.
Leah Quinn, Enniskillen Collegiate Grammar School sid:"It was really unbelievable. I knew the concentration camps were really bad before but I never heard a personal story before. That was really amazing the way she was born too."
"It really gave you an in-depth view of concentration camps," said Jamie Blair Portora Royal School.
Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated on January 27 each year. This date marks the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

ENDS