Born Survivors

Three Jewish women, pregnant by their husbands, survived the Nazi concentration camps and gave birth to babies who defied every effort to destroy them. Their stories converge at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where all three mothers and their newborns were liberated in May 1945.

Priska Löwenbeinová, a twenty-eight-year-old Slovak teacher, grew up in Zlaté Moravce, where her parents ran a kosher café. She married Tibor Löwenbein, a Jewish journalist and bank clerk, in Bratislava in June 1941. Under Slovakia's collaborationist government, the couple endured escalating anti-Jewish persecution and three miscarriages. Priska's parents were deported and killed. In mid-June 1944, the couple conceived again. On 28 September 1944, SS paramilitaries arrested them. From the Sered' transit camp, they were sealed into freight wagons with nearly 1,860 other Slovak Jews. A fellow prisoner, Edita Kelamanová, promised Tibor she would look after Priska. The train reached Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 1 October 1944.

Rachel Friedman, born Rachel Abramczyk, was a twenty-five-year-old Polish Jew from Pabianice near Łódź and the eldest of nine children. In 1937 she married Monik Friedman, a wealthy textile factory owner, and the couple were active in Gordonia, a Zionist youth organization. After Germany invaded Poland, Rachel's family was forced into the Pabianice ghetto, then transported during its 1942 liquidation to the Łódź ghetto, where approximately 230,000 people existed on starvation rations. Shaiah, Rachel's father, built a secret compartment inside a dresser that saved the family during repeated round-ups. When the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944, the family was tricked into assembling and seized. At Birkenau, the family was split: Rachel's mother Fajga and the three youngest children were sent one direction; Rachel and her sisters Sala, Ester, and Bala another; their father and brother Berek into a labor group. It was the last time Rachel saw her parents or younger siblings.

Anka Nathanová, a twenty-seven-year-old Czech law student whose family owned a leather factory in Třebechovice pod Orebem, met Bernhard "Bernd" Nathan, a German Jewish architect who had fled Berlin in 1933, and married him in May 1940. They declined several opportunities to escape occupied Czechoslovakia. In November 1941, Bernd was transported to the Terezín ghetto, a former garrison town the Nazis converted into a holding pen for Jews, and Anka followed voluntarily. The commandant forced Anka at gunpoint to sign a euthanasia consent for her unborn child. Her son Dan was born prematurely in February 1944; the order was mysteriously rescinded, but Dan died of pneumonia at two months old. Anka adopted a survival mantra inspired by Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind: "I'll think about it tomorrow" (112). In June 1944, the International Red Cross visited a heavily beautified Terezín and declared conditions satisfactory; thousands were deported to Auschwitz immediately afterward, including Anka's parents, both sisters, nephew, and brother-in-law. After the D-Day landings, Anka and Bernd conceived again, believing the war was nearly over. Bernd was transported east without knowing Anka was pregnant, and Anka volunteered to follow him, only to find her train continued to Auschwitz.

At Birkenau, each woman faced a selection conducted by SS doctor Josef Mengele, who asked whether they were pregnant; each denied it. Mengele squeezed the breast of a woman near Priska, discovered breast milk, and sent her to an unknown fate. Priska was separated from Tibor on the arrival platform and later spotted him through barbed-wire fencing. He told her the baby was all he was living for. It was the last time she saw him. Rachel and her sisters were told by veteran prisoners that their mother and younger siblings had been gassed. Anka endured at least twelve selections, fainting repeatedly while her friends held her upright to keep her from the gas chambers.

All three women were transported to KZ Freiberg, a munitions factory in Saxony where approximately 1,000 women assembled parts for the Arado Ar 234, the world's first jet-powered bomber, on twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts and starvation rations. By early 1945, the pregnancies began to show. On 12 April 1945, Priska gave birth to a daughter on a wooden plank in the factory sickbay, assisted by prisoner-doctor Edita Mautnerová. The infant weighed roughly three and a half pounds. Priska named her Hana, the name she and Tibor had chosen, with the middle name Edith after Edita Kelamanová, who had watched over Priska since the transport from Slovakia.

Thirty-six hours later, the camp was evacuated. The women were loaded into open-topped coal wagons for a sixteen-day journey across bombed-out central Europe. During an air raid near the city of Most, Rachel went into labor on the floor of an open wagon. Dr. Mautnerová delivered a tiny boy by torchlight, and Rachel named him Mark. On 21 April, the train stopped at the Czech town of Horní Bříza, where stationmaster Antonín Pavlíček organized the townspeople to bake thousands of loaves of bread and prepare soup for the prisoners. Priska found a note hidden in a bread roll: "Hold on! Be strong! It will not last much longer!" (234).

On 29 April 1945, the train reached Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Upper Austria notorious for its granite quarry and gas chamber. The moment Anka read the camp's name on the station wall, her labor began. Loaded onto a cart of dying women, she gave birth as it descended toward the infirmary. The baby did not breathe for several minutes until a prisoner-doctor cut the cord and struck its bottom. Anka was told she had a boy and named him Martin; she later discovered the baby was a girl and renamed her Eva. Rachel, carrying nine-day-old Mark, was marched through the fortress gates and pushed into what she believed was a gas chamber, but no gas came. Priska, climbing the hill on foot with seventeen-day-old Hana, fought off two prisoner-functionaries who tried to seize her baby, crying, "No children here!" (265). A senior functionary intervened and returned the child.

On 5 May 1945, a reconnaissance squad from the US 11th Armored Division liberated the camp. Army medic LeRoy Petersohn found Priska and baby Hana in a barracks and arranged emergency surgery for the infant's abscesses at a nearby field hospital. The three mothers registered their children's births at Mauthausen City Hall and departed on separate repatriation journeys.

Priska sailed down the Danube to Bratislava and learned that Tibor had stopped eating, believing his wife and child were dead, and had perished during a death march in late January 1945. She never remarried, became a professor of languages, and died in 2006 at ninety. Rachel returned to Pabianice and discovered that her parents and youngest siblings had perished; she accepted that Monik was also dead. She remarried, moved to the United States, and died in 2003 at eighty-four. Mark became an emergency physician. Anka returned to Prague and learned that Bernd had been shot by an SS guard during a transport just before liberation. Her parents, both sisters, nephew, and brother-in-law had all been killed. She married Karel Bergman, a wartime Royal Air Force interpreter, and emigrated to Cardiff, Wales. She died in 2013 at ninety-six.

In 2010, sixty-five years after their births, the three met for the first time at a café in Linz, Austria, after Hana's online search for the medics who saved her connected her to Eva and Mark through the 11th Armored Division's veterans' website. They described the encounter as an instant feeling of family. In May 2015, they returned together to the Mauthausen Memorial for the seventieth anniversary of the liberation, walking through the fortress gates in the footsteps of the mothers who had defied death to give them life.