By Isle of Wight Observer
The motto of the Women’s Institute is ‘inspiring women’, and few women are more inspirational than Eva Clarke, and her mother, Anka Nathanova, who both survived the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
Eva was guest speaker at the October meeting of Freshwater Bay WI (FBWI), and explained how she was born in April 1945 on a cart at the Mauthausen death camp in Austria, shortly after her mother arrived there, nine months pregnant and weighing just 5st.
Anka, a Czech, had just endured 17 days packed into a filthy, crowded coal truck, no food, just occasional water to arrive at Mauthausen after six months in a slave labour camp at Freiberg. Before that, she, and her German architect husband, Bernd, had been at Auschwitz in Poland. She later discovered he had been shot, without ever learning she was pregnant.
Members listened horror-struck as Eva told how her parents, and other Jews, had been affected by the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. These laws gradually stripped all Jews of their citizenship, right to vote, to marry other religions, imposed a curfew, excluded them from professions and expelled their children from school.
It happened gradually, so when they were ordered to report to warehouses with a suitcase and saucepans, they were unaware of the nightmare which awaited them in concentration or death camps all over Nazi-occupied Europe.
Anka, and the new-born Eva, were probably saved by the fact that the Mauthausen gas chambers had been shut only a day before they arrived in April 1945, and that the camp was liberated by the Allies within a week.
FBWI president, Lisa Reed, presented Eva with flowers and said: “Eva’s talk was memorable and moving. We were delighted to welcome her, and she just made such a lasting impression.”
Eva is a speaker for the Holocaust Educational Trust, and was awarded the British Empire Medal for ‘services to Holocaust education’.
Isle of Wight Observer