Born Survivors

Summary (from the publisher): The Nazis murdered their husbands but concentration camp prisoners Priska, Rachel, and Anka would not let evil take their unborn children too—a remarkable true story that will appeal to readers of The Lost and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, Born Survivors celebrates three mothers who defied death to give their children life.

Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left—their lives, and those of their unborn babies. Having concealed their condition from infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, they are forced to work and almost starved to death, living in daily fear of their pregnancies being detected by the SS.

In April 1945, as the Allies close in, Priska gives birth. She and her baby, along with Anka, Rachel, and the remaining inmates, are sent to Mauthausen concentration camp on a hellish seventeen-day train journey. Rachel gives birth on the train, and Anka at the camp gates. All believe they will die, but then a miracle occurs. The gas chamber runs out of Zyklon-B, and as the Allied troops near, the SS flee. Against all odds, the three mothers and their newborns survive their treacherous journey to freedom.

On the seventieth anniversary of Mauthausen’s liberation from the Nazis by American soldiers, renowned biographer Wendy Holden recounts this extraordinary story of three children united by their mothers’ unbelievable—yet ultimately successful—fight for survival.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

 

This book tells the story of three separate women who were all in the very early stages of pregnancy  in 1944 when they were separated from their husbands, imprisoned, and sent to Auschwitz. Through sheer luck, all three women escaped being gassed and as the war drew to a close, all three were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp through a hellish train journey that killed hundreds. Remarkably, all three women gave birth to live children and escaped with their lives. The three women never knew they had fellow expectant mothers in the camp with them. As adults, their children discovered they were not the only baby born in the camp and connected and shared their stories. Today they are considered some of the last living survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

 

Like any book about the Holocaust, this book is incredibly emotionally difficult to read. Throughout, I was continually struck by the sheer luck and chance that meant the survival of Priska, Rachel, and Anka and their three children. Thousands just like them perished. Many, many pregnant women were killed before they could deliver, miscarried before full-term, were subjects of inhumane experiments under Nazi physician Mengele, or their children were taken from them and killed through a variety of atrocious means. It is nothing short of a miracle that these three individuals were spared similar fates. It's also nothing short of a miracle that severely malnourished women were able to give birth to live babies that were capable of survival and healthy growth. "I will never forget the look on his face when he stared at this pregnant corpse, weighing maybe sixty-five pounds and most of it belly...a scarcely living skeleton without hair and dirty as you can imagine" (235). All of the babies were only around three pounds at birth. Most of their survival was indeed sheer chance, such as their denial of pregnancy when being questioned by Mengele or the fact that the random clothes the three women were thrown after being stripped of their own clothing were large, baggy items of clothing that concealed their growing stomachs.

 

Although the three women were strangers and never knew one another, their stories were eerily alike. So alike, in fact, that I had hard time as a reader differentiating between the three women. Each of their individual childhood and family stories is shared in the first section of the book and later chapters, once the women were in the camp, blend their stories together as they suffer the same fate, making it more difficult for me to keep their stories separate.

 

Despite the horror of these women's stories, I feel fortunate to be able to read their story. Despite the atrocities they endured, they managed to survive and also save their children, who marked a new beginning for their life after the war. Sadly, each woman lost the majority of her family and all their husbands died in the camps. It was such a bittersweet poignant moment to read how each women desperately hoped their husband would return, but knowing the chances were slim to none. Additionally, I was especially moved that the three children of the women in this story wrote the forward to this book, recognizing that their mothers' stories are now preserved so anyone can witness the ordeal they endured and survived.

 

Stars: 4