Born Survivors

Product Description

Among millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944 Priska Rachel & Anka each passed through its infamous gates with a secret Strangers to each other they were newly pregnant & facing an uncertain fate without their husbands Alone scared & with so many loved ones already lost to the Nazis these young women were privately determined to hold on to all they had left their lives & those of their unborn babies That the gas chambers ran out of Zyklon-B just after the babies were born before they & their mothers could be exterminated is just one of several miracles that allowed them all to survive & rebuild their lives after World War II Born Survivors follows the mothers' incredible journey
- first to Auschwitz where they each came under the murderous scrutiny of Dr Josef Mengele; then to a German slave labour camp where half-starved & almost worked to death they struggled to conceal their condition; & finally as the Allies closed in their hellish 17-day train journey with thousands of other prisoners to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria Hundreds died along the way but the courage & kindness of strangers including guards & civilians helped save these women & their children Sixty-five years later the three 'miracle babies' met for the first time at Mauthausen for the anniversary of the liberation that ultimately saved them United by their remarkable experiences of survival against all odds they now consider each other siblings of the heart In Born Survivors Wendy Holden brings all three stories together for the first time to mark their seventieth birthdays & the seventieth anniversary of the ending of the war A heart-stopping account of how three mothers & their newborns fought to survive the Holocaust Born Survivors is also a life-affirming celebration of our capacity to care & to love amid inconceivable cruelty