Eva Clarke BEM: I first started to learn her story... I came home from school I was about, I think about six or seven, and I noticed on the back of the kitchen door there was a brown, suede shopping bag, and it had the initials A.N. on it.

So I said to her, you know, 'what are the letters?' and she took apparently she took a deep breath. She told herself, 'here we go'.

Tim Cole: In this episode, our guest is Eva Clark.

Eva Clarke BEM: As I grew older, so the replies became more detailed. And that is why I know my mother's stories so well.

Tim Cole: I'm Tim Cole.

Louisa Clein: And I'm Louisa Klein. From the Holocaust Educational Trust, this is Objects of the Holocaust.

Tim Cole: A podcast which explores the Holocaust through a single object, to tell wider stories of family, loss, and survival.

Louisa Clein: Thank you so much for joining us today. It's an absolute joy to have you here. So I'm holding in my hand a piece of paper, it's not the original, because the original is actually displayed in the Imperial War Museum.

I'm looking at it, and the thing that strikes me first of all, is there's a date on it, the 29th of April 1945. And a time of 8:30 in the evening, and a name of a place, which is a very recognizable name.

Can you tell me a little bit about what this piece of paper means to you?

Eva Clarke BEM: There are lots of remarkable things about my story and all the credit goes to my mother. She said to me, 'Well, you've heard about the war,' and I indicated, 'sort of,' because it was talked a lot about in the background between my parents and their friends.

And she said, 'Well, you had two daddies, and one daddy was killed in the war. Now you've got another daddy.'

That's all she said.

And because I was always asking her questions, she said I was basically like a sponge. It was added to as appropriate, as she felt that I could cope.

Louisa Clein: Can you tell us a bit about your mother as a person?

Eva Clarke BEM: So my mother was a very lively person. She was very open, she was very sociable. She was the youngest of, well, three siblings, and she was the first one to go to university in her family. And she was a law student in Prague — just the first year.

And she met my father, Bernd who was German, he came from Hamburg. And he had left Hamburg in 1933, realizing it was sensible to get out of Germany. And he came to Prague thinking that that was far enough to be safe. It wasn't, but if he hadn't come to Prague, he wouldn't have met my mother, and I would not be talking to you now.

They fell madly in love, he was an architect and interior designer, and it's — it really is very interesting. Initially, he was employed by German officers to design restaurants and nightclubs in Prague.

Louisa Clein: What sort of date are we talking here with this?

Eva Clarke BEM: My parents got married on the 15th of May, 1940. My mother's name was Anna or Anka, and her first married surname was Nathan, so A.N.

But then in November, December of 1941, that is when they were deported to Terezin or Theresienstadt.

Tim Cole: So they're sent to Terezin at the end of 1941. Terezin is this kind of holding camp for Czech Jews. So Jews from all over Czechoslovakia being sent to Terezin, and then most sent on to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

How long are they in Terezin?

Eva Clarke BEM: Well, but also I would have to say that there were Jews from all over Europe sent there. Because — ironically enough — it was in Terezin that my mother met her parents-in-law for the first time, which is a very strange thing!

Tim Cole: Can you tell us about that meeting? How does she describe that?

Eva Clarke BEM: Well, my paternal grandparents, they were actually divorced. But they came from Westerbork, from the holding the transit camp in Holland. And they arrived in Terezin and my own parents were already there.

As is often the case, my mother didn't get on very well with her mother-in-law. But on the other hand, it was a very strange set of circumstances in which to meet your parents-in-law, very strange.

Louisa Clein: From what I understand, Tim, Terezin was very much a camp where life continued in a — not a normal way — but in a more normal way than in some places.

Were your parents able to stay together?

Eva Clarke BEM: No.

Louisa Clein: Okay.

Eva Clarke BEM: No, because when families arrived in Terezin, they were split up. So men were sent to one part, women to another part, elderly people to another part, and children to yet another part. They were able to meet up sometimes during the day, but to a large extent they let separate lives.

And when my mother arrived in Terezin, she was fortunate enough to be given a job. The job wasn't paid, though, but life was a bit easier if you had a job. And her job, certainly one time, was working for the man who had the responsibility for sharing out the food.

There wasn't much food there, but what there was, they tried to share out in a fair fashion. And that meant that she had access to food. When I say she had access to food: she would steal. She would steal a potato, a carrot, an onion. Just something with which to make a more substantial soup. And that was literally of vital importance, because at one time my mother had the responsibility — every single day — for trying to find food for 15 members of her close family. Every single day. That was her main worry - how an earth was she going to find enough food for all those people?

And that was quite apart from the greater worries, to what on earth was going to have to them all in the future.

Tim Cole: And your father, what was he doing? Was he working as well?

Eva Clarke BEM: He was working. I don't quite know what his role was, but he was one of the sort of policeman. And I don't know any details about that at all.

Tim Cole: I mean, it's interesting, I think, Terezin, because Terezin is this odd mix between a concentration camp and a ghetto. It's kind of half ghetto... you know, in the ghetto, traditionally, families are kept together, whereas here, Terezin, they's separation by sex. So you have these kind of women's barracks and men's barracks.

But it's also a little bit like a ghetto, because you have a ghetto police force. And that's interesting, I think, that your dad is part of the ghetto police force, because they occupy this kind of important role. They guard the interior of the gate. And there's some privileges that go with that job, which means often that you stay in Terezin longer. So you're not part of the early deportations.

I don't know what your mum's reflections are, or recollections from memories of day to day life in Terezin. And I mean, I'm particularly interested in the fact that they are married but separate.

Eva Clarke BEM: My mother always said it was very, very dangerous, but they managed to get together secretly. And she said, 'end of story.'

I mean, at one time, I believe they did, because my father managed to get a sort of a small space for themselves in one of the loft areas, I believe, but I don't know any details about that.

I'd sort of said to her as a curious teenager, 'so how come you got pregnant?'

And anyways, she became pregnant with my brother Jiri (which means George), but it had very serious consequences. Because when the Nazis discovered that my mother and four of the women had also become pregnant, they made these five couples sign a document that said, 'When the babies were born, they would have to be handed over to be killed.'

Except they didn't use the word kill, they use the word 'euthanasia'. My mother never heard the word euthanasia.' She had to go and ask somebody what it meant.

In the event, the other four babies were born, we don't actually know what happened to them. We assume all those families perished in Auschwitz. When my brother Jiri was born on the 10th of February 1944, he was not taken away from my parents, but he actually died of pneumonia two months later.

And his death meant my life and my mother's life. Because had she arrived in Auschwitz holding my brother in her arms, they would have both been sent to the gas chambers. But because she arrived in Auschwitz not holding my brother, and although she was pregnant again — this time with me — nobody knew.

And it was very, very early on.

So again, she lived to see another day.

Eva Clarke BEM: My mother was in Auschwitz for a very short period of time, but she said nevertheless it was sheer hell on Earth. She said it was like Dante's Inferno.

She was there for 10 days.

And after those 10 days, because she was still considered to be strong enough for work. She was sent out of Auschwitz with a group of young women who were also strong enough to work. To give you an idea of my mother's physical strength, age 14, she was school's junior backstroke swimming champion of Czechoslovakia. So it gives you an idea of her physical strength.

And she always maintained that if this whole experience had to happen to her, she was at the right age — not only physically, but psychologically and emotionally.

She was in her mid-20s. She was tough. She was strong.

Tim Cole: And I think there is something really striking about that generation of women who enter Auschwitz at that period of time.

So there's a shift in Nazi policy in '44, which is that they're increasingly looking for Jewish labour. I think — if you think about 1942, essentially what the Nazis are doing is just murdering Jews. So they're not really sparing anyone. They're just murdering Jews.

By '44, the war's turning. And I think — especially young Jewish women who've got nimble little fingers to work in armaments — they're like, oh, we actually need a few.

And I think it's interesting, because your mum is sent to Germany. And if you think about Germany, Germany is a place that's made Judenfrei — it's made free of Jews by the Nazis in roughly 1941. I mean, apart from Jews in hiding. Jews are being sent east. But in 1944 actually Jews are really being moved towards Germany, including your mum, to work.

Eva Clarke BEM: In Freiburg in Saxony, in the arms factory.

Tim Cole: What's she making there?

Eva Clarke BEM: She said she was working on the tail fin of the V1. And also — it's an interesting aside — when my mother and this group of young women arrived in Freiburg, the very first impression they had was one of bedbugs. The place was crawling: on the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor everywhere.

And they were delighted!

Because it implied that there was some food there. Not much! And there were some warmth there — again, not much. And they very quickly ascertain that there were no gas chambers there. After a few days, they weren't quite so pleased when the bug started to bite them. They were dropping into their drink or whatever. But my mother said they were just so relieved that there were no gas chambers.

Louisa Clein: And your mother is how many months pregnant at this point?

Eva Clarke BEM: Wait a minute, we have to work backwards. My birth date is the end of April '45. This is the previous October.

Louisa Clein: She's growing a baby.

Eva Clarke BEM: Yes.

Louisa Clein: She's starving.

Eva Clarke BEM: Yes.

Louisa Clein: She's working in a bed bug, infested factory and all hours.

Eva Clarke BEM: And on starvation rations, you know, next to nothing.

Tim Cole: And do you know anything about your dad? Did you ever find out where he was working?

Eva Clarke BEM: He stays in Auschwitz. He was working, I believe, in Monowitz. But I don't know any details, I'm afraid.

Tim Cole: Which I think is really, in some ways, it's almost the classic story, your parents story. Because that, I think, gender is so important in the Holocaust. That so many men who arrive in Auschwitz end up in Monowitz. So again, in armaments or in chemical industries, a chemical factory. And so many women are shipped out of Auschwitz.

I mean, some women stay. But in a sense, I think it's a kind of classic story of the separation of the sexes at this point in time.

But as you say, what's so important to think about is that if your mother had gone to Auschwitz with a one-year-old child, I mean, she would have been murdered straight away. Because mothers, you know, are sent with their children to the gas chambers.

Did she ever talk about that or reflect on that? Because obviously, to lose a child is a terrible thing. But in a sense, without losing the child, he would have lost her own life. And you wouldn't have been born.

Did she reflect on that?

Eva Clarke BEM: She did, I mean, somebody — perhaps more than once, I don't know — did ask her if she mourned my brother at all. She said, 'I didn't have time. I was trying to survive'. And she said, 'no, I couldn't, because I wouldn't have survived,' and I wouldn't have either.

Tim Cole: She sounds an amazing woman.

Eva Clarke BEM: She was!

Tim Cole: Matter of fact.

Eva Clarke BEM: Very, very.

Tim Cole: So she ends up with a bunch of women in an armaments factory. They're working indoors. There's a little bit of heat. The conditions are terrible, but it's better than being outdoors. Hence she survives.

And how long do they work in the armaments factory for?

Eva Clarke BEM: Six months. And as you said, she was becoming progressively more and more starved and more and more pregnant. And also, at some point, the Germans realized that she was pregnant and they put her on, in quotes, 'lighter duties'.

So she wasn't riveting anymore. They got her, this factory — the building still exists in Freiberg. And I think it's a three or a four-story building — and they got her sweeping the stairs every day.

Eva Clarke BEM: At the end of March, beginning of April of '45, this is when the Germans realized they were losing the war and this is when they began to evacuate the camps. Because they were trying to empty the camps of living witnesses as to what to be going on inside.

And this is when the notorious death marches happened.

My mother wasn't on a death march, but she was put on yet another train. It didn't consist of cattle trucks. This time, it consisted of coal wagons, open to the skies and filthy. And my mother was on a train like this with 2,000 prisoners for 17 days.

At some point, the train was stopped. And my mother thought the train had stopped in the middle of the countryside. She obviously was at the end of the train, because it was all, you know, woods and fields.

When the train stopped, the doors were open, the dead bodies thrown out and a farmer walked by. And he saw my mother and he had such a shock. My mother described herself as looking like a scarcely living pregnant skeleton. She weighed five stone, 35 kilograms, and she was nine months pregnant.

And this farmer brought her a glass of milk. But there was an arse officer standing near her, and he had a whip. And he raised this whipped shoulder height, as if to beat my mother if she accepted the glass of milk.

But he didn't. He lowered his arm. He let her have the glass of milk.

She maintained that saved her life.

The train went on, and it eventually arrived in this place called Mauthausen. Mauthausen itself was a beautiful village on the banks of the Danube in Austria, near Linz.

A concentration camp was up the steep hill behind the village. And when my mother saw the name Mauthausen at the station, she had such a shock. Because — as opposed to when she'd arrived in Auschwitz, not knowing what that was — this time she knew. Because she had heard about this appalling place from very early on in the war.

And she said the shock was so great that she always thought that it possibly, probably provoked the onset of her labour. And she started to give birth to me.

She had to climb off the train unaided. She had to climb onto a cart. Because the prisoners who were not strong enough to walk up the hill, they had to get onto carts, and they were pulled up by others.

She had people lying all over her. People with typhus and typhoid fever.

And she proceeded to give birth to me.

And there was another Nazi officer who saw that she was in the midst of child labour, and he said to her, "du kannst weiter schreien," which means, 'you can carry on screaming'. Because presumably she had been. And she always said that she was screaming not only because she was in labour, but because she thought this time, this was her very last minute on this earth. She thought she was about to die.

But I was born, we both survived the experience.

Incredibly, the Germans allowed a doctor to come to my mother: a doctor who was also a prisoner. And presumably they allowed it because they could hear the guns in the distance. And the doctor came and he cut the umbilical cord and he smacked me to make me cry, to make me breathe.

And so that's when she called me Eva, which actually means life.

Tim Cole: Your story, Eva, is incredible. Because I've met a lot of survivors who say that the worst point of the war for them were those journeys in open train cars during their evacuations. Because it's over two weeks, you're exposed to the elements. There's no food or water, unless someone gives you some food or water.

And also people talk about how, in a sense, you have to try and make sure you're at the top of the pile of bodies. Because if you fall underneath, you can't breathe. And so it's like almost like a life and death struggle.

So I just cannot imagine a woman whose nine months pregnant, going through that and surviving. And then giving birth when she arrives.

I mean, it's kind of extraordinary because it is.

Eva Clarke BEM: It is.

Tim Cole: I mean, this is almost the hardest point of the Holocaust for so many people who survive.

Louisa Clein: But in the same way, there is a feeling that she has something to live for that is so great that gives her a superpower that gives her the strength and an incentive, exactly.

Tim Cole: And I think it is striking that she gives birth when she arrives in some ways, that it's this moment, like the journey is over. I mean, it's a terrible place to arrive to. But maybe it's better than being in this car on this unending journey to wherever. Because I think that's one thing about these moments of evacuation is that, no one has a clue where they're going, do they?

Eva Clarke BEM: No idea.

Tim Cole: Just trundling through the European countryside.

Eva Clarke BEM: And in fact, when they were on the train — if you look at the map — they were hopeful that the train was going to go in back to Terezin. That's what they were hoping. And then they realised — it turned whichever direction that was then — they realised where they were going.

Louisa Clein: I'm really interested, you've talked about when your mother arrived at Mauthausen, the panic that she felt, that she'd heard of this place.

Tim, can you tell us a little bit about Mauthausen as a concentration camp?

Tim Cole: Yeah, I think that's because, you know, Mauthausen is very well known because it's one of the really early camps, so it set up in 1938. The first concentration camp is Dachau in 1933, and they actually send prisoners from Dachau to build Mauthausen.

And I think it gains notoriety because it's built by a quarry, so there's a huge granite quarry. And it's built there because it's to quarry stone to build the Führer cities. So to build these kind of grand cities that the Führer plans to build as part of the thousand-year Reich.

And so it's notorious for having a brutal regime. Because essentially you're worked to death carrying huge quarried granite on your back up a set of stairs that rise up from the quarry up to where the camp is.

It's a camp mainly of political prisoners, so not Jewish prisoners, and only of men until a little bit later in the war. So in 1943, you start to get the first women prisoners, but really only first Jewish prisoners, largely in 1943, '44. And then you get this moment in 1945 where it becomes a kind of dumping ground of Jews from all the way across the continent — including your mum, Eva, who ends up there, like many Jewish women and men who were kind of taken there because there's nowhere else to go.

Louisa Clein: And there were gas chambers there?

Tim Cole: Yeah, there's gas chambers there. It's not a death camp in the way that Auschwitz is. What the gas chambers tend to be used for is really to kill those prisoners who can no longer work. So sick prisoners who can no longer work are sent to the gas chambers and murdered.

And then there's crematorium where there are ashes. They're reduced to ash, and the ashes are sprinkled out in the fields.

So it's not a place like Auschwitz where there's purpose-built gas chambers just to kill people who arrive. But it's to get rid of the bodies of those who are sick.

Eva Clarke BEM: I always say that there are three reasons why we survived, and the first is a very poignant one. On the 28th of April, the Nazis had run out of gas for the gas chamber. My birthday is the 29th. So presumably had the train arrived on the 26th or 27th, again, I wouldn't be talking to you.

The second indirect reason why we survived is because on the 30th of April, Hitler committed suicide.

And the last and the best reason why we survived was because on the 5th of May, the American army liberated the camp. My mother reckoned she wouldn't have lasted much longer.

Louisa Clein: So can you tell us on the day of liberation, what happened then?

Eva Clarke BEM: Right, well the Americans arrive, and my mother spoke fluent English, and she tried to tell as many people as possible who didn't what the Americans were saying. And they were saying because they were handing out the food. They were saying to eat very, very slowly and tiny amounts, because when you've been starved for months and years, your body just cannot take food.

And so she was trying to tell many people to do that, but you can understand. If you've been starved for months and years, and suddenly you're handed an American chocolate Hershey bar, you tend to scoff a lot.

And an awful lot of people, my mother, said at that stage collapsed and died.

Louisa Clein: So she arrived back in Prague in 1945?

Eva Clarke BEM: Yes, in the three weeks after I was, after we were liberated, she was then strong enough to go back. And the Americans asked her if she wanted to be repatriated to Prague, so she did. And we came back and we were on an ordinary train this time. And we came back and it was dark. It was at night. And my mother said that was the worst moment of her three and a half years in concentration in camps. Because up to that moment she'd never allowed herself to think as to what had probably happened to all the rest of the family. She just never let herself to think about it.

But you know, arriving at your home station, you wonder if there'd be anybody there to meet you, and of course there wasn't.

Louisa Clein: She didn't know whether her husband, your father, was still alive.

Eva Clarke BEM: She didn't know about anybody. My aunt had come back from Terezin a few days before we came back from Mauthausen. And my aunt had even heard on the grapevine that my mother had survived and that incredibly she had a baby.

And so my mother, you know, arrives and my mother was a very practical woman. And the first word she said to my aunt were, 'please can we stay for a few days to recover?'

Well, we actually stayed for three years. And that was fantastic because we had our own family support group. It was a tiny family because we were almost the only survivors from what had been a very large extended family.

Tim Cole: And all the rest, are deported through Terezin to Auschwitz and murdered at Auschwitz. Only your mum survives.

Eva Clarke BEM: My mum and my paternal grandfather.

Tim Cole: I'm shocked in some ways by — an American GI arrives in Mauthausen and then finds your mother with a tiny new-born baby. And then your aunt opens the door in Prague three weeks later and finds her niece with a tiny new-born baby as well. Like, did your mum say anything about those kinds of experiences or responses? Were people as a surprised as I am that this woman has just given birth to a child?

Eva Clarke BEM: Well, yes, but also what was very interesting and my mother got very angry about that, because my aunt immediately sent her to a gynaecologist to be checked, et cetera. It shows, I don't know, remarkable powers of recovery. But this man — and my mother was furious. She had a pretty quick temper — because he denied that she could have given birth a month before. He denied. He said, 'well, there are no signs of it.' Don't ask me. I have no idea, but he said 'it couldn't have happened!'

And she just insisted, 'Well, it did! I'm bringing the baby to show, if you like.'

So I can't explain that.

Louisa Clein: It's interesting because the human body at times, when a female body is in a state of trauma, it's not able to conceive.

Eva Clarke BEM: Yeah, sure.

Louisa Clein: And yet your mother did and consequently survived a birth and healed and recovered from that.

Eva Clarke BEM: And also what I have to tell you, which is pretty poignant as well. My mother, well, I told her she was a champion swimmer. Well, she had a, she was bigger built than I am. And what was particularly poignant was when we lived with my aunt and you know, they didn't have much food and there wasn't much food around, et cetera. And my mother could not help herself at night. She would just eat all the bread that was in the kitchen. She just couldn't stop herself.

Tim Cole: So your, Mum and you are back in Prague. This is 1945. Can you remember when your Mum said she first heard about the fate of your father? What was the kind of circumstances of hearing about that?

Eva Clarke BEM: Yes. Quite soon. And as I... and she was very grateful to get closure, because an awful lot of people never got closure even to this day. And it's very difficult to move on if you haven't had closure. And she said that she was pushing me in the pram somewhere through Prague. And a friend of my father's, particularly my father, but she knew him as well. A friend stopped her quite abruptly and he was very brusque. He said, 'don't wait for your husband. I saw him. I was a witness to his being shot dead, on a death march, near Auschwitz on the 18th of January 45. And Auschwitz was liberated on the 27th.'

So that did help her enormously.

And I'm not at all sure about how and when she found out all the details about how and when all the other members of the family, her own parents, her two sisters, her nephew, when she found out about their deaths.

Tim Cole: So we've let's go back to the object that we started with: this very ordinary piece of paper, but also an extraordinary piece of paper, which is your birth certificate. And the thing that really strikes me about it is that you're born in 45, but the certificate only is issued in 1948. So three years after your birth.

Eva Clarke BEM: Right. Well, what I have to tell you is that apparently there was a handwritten certificate early on. But in fact, for some reason, my mother had to send this to some official and she never got it back.

So then, when my mother married my stepfather in 1948, and when we were about to leave Czechoslovakia, because the Communists took over, she had to have papers for me. So she wrote to Mauthausen and said, 'you know, I've got to have my child's birth certificate,' and that was in 1948. And that's why that date is on the bottom of it.

Tim Cole: So your mum doesn't have to go back to get the birth certificate. She does this by mail and then heads off to Cardiff. But does she ever go back to Mauthausen? And do you ever go to Mauthausen — this place that you're born, but you've never seen or you saw as a tiny child but you have no kind of knowledge of or remembrance of?

Eva Clarke BEM: Well, the first time I ever went back as an adult, was actually with my husband and my two children when they were very young — they were five and eight.

When we arrived at the camp there was a sign outside that said anybody who had any relatives in this camp can go in free and I thought, 'big deal!' So I said to him — I speak hardly any German — I said to the man in the kiosk, I said, 'ich war geboren hier.' And he went... which I understand.

You know, we were young, English couple, small children, what would we have to do with this? Anyway, I said it again by which time I was crying and Malcolm came up and he did speak German and he explained that I was born on a cart between the station and the camp and the man, understandably, he still didn't believe us. But he'd had enough by that stage and he just said, 'just go.'

Tim Cole: And what are your memories of that? What was it like to go to Mauthausen and walk around on your own for the first time?

Eva Clarke BEM: Well, I suppose I was pretty emotional by that stage knowing where I was, where I ended up thinking about my mother when she ended up there.

Louisa Clein: You were bringing your children as well?

Eva Clarke BEM: Exactly. I had, fortunately, I had my children in a hospital, in Cambridge under perfectly normal circumstances. So yes, I was in a pretty emotional state. But I think that was the main part of the emotion as opposed to when I was actually walking round the actual camp, because it looked like a prison.

Tim Cole: So Eva, you have this totally remarkable story and this extraordinary object, a birth certificate from Mauthausen. Have you ever met anyone else who has a birth certificate from Mauthausen and who shares in a sense your remarkable story?

Eva Clarke BEM: Yes, in a word. I have met two other babies who were born in very similar circumstances at the same time and in roughly the same place. I have to tell you that these three mothers, they all arrived in Auschwitz pregnant. They were all in the Freiberg slave labour camp for six months. They were all on a horrendous train journey in open coal wagons for 17 days. They all gave birth in the most dire of circumstances in April of 1945 and we all survived.

All three mothers, all three babies, none of the fathers.

Louisa Clein: So can you talk about the first time that you met each other?

Eva Clarke BEM: Right, it was on the 60th anniversary of the commemoration of the liberation of Mauthausen. We all stayed in Linz, which is close to Mauthausen. And that first day when we met, we sat in the café the whole day just talking, laughing and crying and talking about our mothers.

I mean it really was quite remarkable.

Tim Cole: Did any of you have siblings? Any of the three of you have siblings?

Eva Clarke BEM: No, by chance none of us has siblings, so we all feel as though we did now do have siblings.

Tim Cole: These are the Mauthausen babies. The three Mauthausen babies.

Eva Clarke BEM: Yes.

Tim Cole: I'm aware, Eva, that you've done a lot of work with Holocaust Educational Trust. You've spoken in lots of schools. You're very open about talking about your own story and your mother's story. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with this event, the Holocaust, your own sense of do you see yourself as a survivor? What's your senses?

Eva Clarke BEM: You see myself, basically, I imagine as you do, I feel I'm a survivor through an accident of birth. But actually I'm more of a second generation person because I don't have any memories.

And obviously I'm very proud of my mother, very proud of what she went through and everything about her. And I've always, you know, although it seems like a very long time since I started speaking in schools, you know, because I started working for HET about 20 years ago, which I can't believe myself!

And prior to that, I did speak very occasionally just locally in some schools. And my mother was very pleased when I started to do this because up to that time she'd spoken in a very small way to small groups in Cardiff, which is where she lived.

And when I started doing this, she said, 'great, I don't have to do it anymore.'

Louisa Clein: Every year on your birthday is there a moment that you think about that day, 70, 80 years previous?

Eva Clarke BEM: Oh, yes! Because I mainly think about my mother, sure.

Louisa Clein: That's not nothing because I love my mother with all my heart, but on my birthday, my mom's not necessarily the person I think of.

Eva Clarke BEM: Well, I don't know if she's the first one.

Louisa Clein: She's an extraordinary woman, and what an incredible celebration of her every year.

Eva Clarke BEM: And next year, I can't believe, and she wouldn't be able to believe that I'm actually going to be eighty!

Tim Cole: And it'll be the eight-year anniversary of the Liberation of Terezin.

Eva Clarke BEM: And we'll all be there. We're all going to be there in Mauthausen.

Louisa Clein: A true testament of survival, both her and you.

Tim Cole: Thank you, Eva, so much for sharing your story.

Eva Clarke BEM: Thank you. Thank you for asking.

Louisa Clein: Thank you.

Eva Clarke BEM: My mother would be very pleased.

Louisa Clein: Objects of the Holocaust is presented by me, Louisa Clein and Tim Cole, and produced by Sarah Peters at Tuning Fork Productions.

Original music is by Iain Chambers, and sound design is by Peregrine Andrews.

With thanks to Beth Lloyd, Annabel Pattle, Kirsty Young and Karen Pollock from the Holocaust Educational Trust.

The Holocaust Educational Trust is a charity that works across the UK to ensure that the horrors of the past are never forgotten.

Details of the charity can be found in the show notes.