History of Sorts

A truly remarkable story of love and survival.

In the late 1930s, Anka Bergman was a lively law student living in the Czechoslovakian capital, Prague.

“I wanted company and boyfriends and to enjoy myself. I didn’t know that Hitler was coming, but I filled my time with only cinemas and theatres and concerts and parties,” she says.

At a nightclub, Anka met her husband, Bernd Nathan, an attractive German-Jewish architect who had fled Germany in 1933.

“He thought that it was far enough to be safe,” said Eva. “It wasn’t but, if he hadn’t come to Prague, he wouldn’t have met my mother.”

In March 1939, the Nazis invaded Prague. From that moment on, Anka’s life, and Bernd’s, was changed forever. Anka and her entire family were sent to Theresienstadt.

Although men and women were segregated, the couple met secretly, managed to have sex, and Anka became pregnant. They had a boy that died from pneumonia when he was two months old.

She fell pregnant again in late 1944. Mr Nathan was sent to Auschwitz, and Anka volunteered to follow him.

She was pregnant with Eva on her arrival. However, she was never reunited with Bernd and later discovered that he had been murdered on 18 January 1945. He never knew his wife was even pregnant.

Anka was moved from Auschwitz–Birkenau to a slave labour camp near Dresden, Germany, where she remained for six months. She was later forced to endure a horrific seventeen-day journey to Mauthausen, in open coal wagons, without food, little water and filthy conditions. On arrival at Mauthausen, Anka was so shocked when she saw the name of the notorious concentration camp that she went into labour. Anka weighed just five stone when she gave birth to Eva, who weighed just 3 pounds. It was 29 April 1945, just a few days before Mauthausen was liberated. Her birth certificate was issued on 14 April 1948 by the Standesamt registry office of Mauthausen an der Donau, a small town in Austria where the concentration camp was located.

Previously, when arriving at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Nazi SS doctor Josef Mengele asked Anka if she was pregnant, to which she lied and replied no. The Americans arrived six days later, and an Army Signal Corps cameraman filmed the human wreckage as evidence of Nazi atrocities. He also filmed Anka with her new baby.

Anka was never reunited with her Husband Bernd and later discovered that he had been murdered on 18 January 1945. He never knew his wife was even pregnant.

After returning to Prague, Anka met Karel Bergman, who served as a translator in the RAF during the war but returned to his home country. The birth certificate was needed so Anka and her family could emigrate from Prague to the UK, where they settled in Cardiff.

Anka’s Daughter Eva grew up in the UK. In the 1960s, she met and married Malcolm Clarke, a lawyer from Abergavenny, and they had two sons. Her father-in-law, Kenneth Clarke, was a navigator in RAF Bomber Command who participated in the bombing of Dresden.

sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-13069586

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-13069586

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-38945394

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/born-in-a-concentration-camp-eva-clarke

https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb8877542s