I was born in a Nazi concentration camp

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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

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