The Unlucky Ones. But
There Is A Truly Astounding Story Of How Three Women Cheated Demon Doctor
Of Death By Hiding Their Pregnancies... And Raised Their Newborns In The Very
Cradle Of Nazi Horror
* Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele became known as 'The Angel of Death'
* He inspected each new prisoner and asked if they were expecting a child
* Priska Lowenbeinova concealed her pregnancy and raised baby in camp
* Two other women also lied about their condition and their babies survived
By Wendy Holden For The Mail On Sunday'Are you pregnant, pretty woman?' Dr Josef Mengele asked the 28-year-old Slovak language teacher as she stood on parade – naked, shaven-headed and shivering – within hours of arriving at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.It was October 1944, and the Nazis were accelerating the Final Solution, their murderous plan to exterminate the Jews and other 'enemies of the Reich' as the tide of war turned against them.The man who later became known as The Angel of Death was dressed impeccably in his grey-green uniform with silver skulls on the collar as he inspected each new prisoner and – more specifically – asked if they were expecting a child, which could become a subject for his sickening human experiments.
Auschwitz survivor Anka
Nathanova concealed her pregnancy and raised her baby Eva (pictured together)
in the death camp
When it was her turn,
Priska Lowenbeinova didn't hesitate. Shaking her head quickly, she replied
'Nein' in German, even though she was two months pregnant. She had no idea if
telling the truth might save her or condemn them both.
None of the wide-eyed
women knew then that Mengele's whim could consign them to the gas chambers, the
agony of experimentation or pitiless hard labour.
It was an
act of huge bravery, or maybe desperation. Yet unknown to Priska, who had
conceived while living with her husband Tibor in Bratislava, two other pregnant
women had also come face to face with Mengele at Auschwitz at the time. And
they, too, had lied about their condition.
Rachel
Friedman had been transported there from the Jewish ghetto in the Polish
industrial city of Lodz; Anka Nathanova, the third of the women, was a former
law student from Prague who had become pregnant while living with her husband
Bernd in a 'model' internment camp in the Czech garrison town of Terezin.
All three
were passed as fit for work by Mengele and despatched to make components for
the Luftwaffe at a labour camp.
Dr Josef Mengele conducted
grotesque experiments at Auschwitz and sent thousands to the gas chambers
Amid the almost unimaginable
chaos that confronted them when they each arrived at Auschwitz, it is no
surprise that the three mothers never met – or knew that others were also
pregnant. Rachel never even told her three sisters she was pregnant even though
they spent the rest of the war with her. Suffering from sudden and dangerous
weight loss in such a murderous regime, they shrank inside the baggy clothing
they'd been thrown by prisoner-guards so kept their pregnancies hidden until
full term.
Incredibly, they and their
tiny 3lb infants survived the horrors of the death camps, the brutality of
slave labour and a final terrifying journey before being liberated. None
believed that any other newborn could have survived such an ordeal and
astonishingly these three 'miracle children' only learned of each others'
existence five years ago when they were reunited at an event for camp survivors.
I have pieced together their
remarkable stories from their mothers' memories, letters and stories,
reinforced by the testimony of independent witnesses and archives.
By April 1945 all three women
had been incarcerated in an old porcelain factory in Freiberg, Saxony, for up
to seven months. Wearing their Auschwitz clothes, without underwear, plus
horrid wooden clogs, these once-cultured women endured freezing conditions in
Europe's worst winter for 15 years. They worked seven days a week using heavy
machinery on little more than subsistence rations. Several of their fellow
inmates died of starvation or disease, others had been returned to Auschwitz
and certain deaths.
These three mothers may have
passed the 'Mengele test' and avoided that fate but they now found themselves
in a different sort of hell. Then one morning, during a cold-water wash, Priska
once again found herself fearing for her life.
A Czech prisoner spotted her
tiny swollen belly and became hysterical. 'You'll get us all killed!' she
screamed as the camp guards came running. Priska froze, her heart pounding. 'Is
it true?' a female SS guard asked Priska, who weighed just five stone. Priska,
expecting to be shot on the spot, was forced to admit she was.
With the Allies closing in,
the guards were not sure what they should do. Days passed before a guard
quietly asked her: 'What do you need?' By that stage Priska's feet, swollen and
oozing pus from the cold and the rough clogs, had become her worst torment. To
her amazement, a bowl of hot water was brought for her to soak them in. She
knew the sudden change of heart among the guards was almost certainly self-serving,
but she welcomed it.
SS guards watched when
Priska Lowenbeinova gave birth on a wooden plank laid across a table in the
factory and placed bets on whether the baby would be a boy or a girl, pictured
with daughter Hana
Thousands of
inmates were murdered, but others were allotted a different fate as the Nazi
high command clung to the belief that they would still need slave labour to
rebuild the Reich. Those given a chance to survive, like the women of KZ
Freiberg, were transported by train. The less fortunate were forced on long
'death marches' in the middle of a brutally harsh winter.
Priska with her baby and 35
other sick women were among the last to leave. Initially they were ordered to
march in the freezing rain with the others. When it became clear they couldn't
keep up, the guards told the rest of the prisoners to move on.
'The others were convinced
they were going to execute us,' Priska said. 'They were saying goodbye and
crying.' But the women were loaded into a military truck and driven to the
station. Baby Hana was so lethargic she hardly moved. Trying to keep her warm,
Priska pressed her daughter against her heart, kissed her head and prayed.
'I told myself it is all in
the hands of God. He knew where I gave birth, so that's why he helped me.'
She didn't know it until many
years later, but she was on the same train as Anka and Rachel, who were both
heavily pregnant and still hiding their condition. Rachel, now so fragile she'd
been placed on the floor of an open coal wagon with the dying 'like herrings in
a tin', was a few cars further along.
The only wagons available for
the 990 Jewish women were 15 open-topped trucks and a handful of closed cattle
cars. They were herded in, at least 60 to a truck, as grisly rumours of their
destination spread: were they to be buried alive or transported to an
extermination camp in Bavaria? As the Allies bombed tracks and liberated more
camps, the journey continued interminably.
On April 19, five days after
they had left Freiberg, in the middle of a night air raid, Rachel's waters
broke. Sprawled on the faeces-covered floor and sandwiched between the dead,
she gripped the arm of her sister Bala as the contractions took hold. A guard
called for help and someone found Dr Edita.
The boy was small. 'Another
Jew for the Fuhrer!' one of the guards shouted. Too weak to be happy, Rachel
felt numb. She had secretly decided to name him Max (later to be known as
Mark). 'I was thinking, 'So I have a child, or I don't have a child.' We didn't
know what was going to happen.'
With no sharp objects to
sever the umbilical cord, someone suggested Rachel bite through it. Eventually
an SS guard handed Edita a dirty razor blade. 'They also found a cardboard box
and put the baby in,' Rachel recalled.
Incredibly, Rachel had a
little breast milk and was able to feed the baby. Rachel asked the date,
determined to remember her son's birthday whether he lived or died. An SS guard
replied: 'Say the boy was born on Hitler's birthday – April 20th. It might save
him.'
By this time the
women hardly worked and were mostly confined to lice-infested barracks, from
where they witnessed the bombing of Dresden and heard frequent shelling. Many
no longer cared.
On the morning of April 12,
Priska went into labour and was helped on to a wooden plank laid across a table
in the factory, watched by SS guards betting on whether the baby would be a boy
or a girl. 'They said that if it was a girl the war would be over, and if it
was a boy then it would go on for even longer,' she recalled.
At 3.50pm, according to a
guard's watch, Priska gave birth. 'It's a girl!' the Germans cried happily.
'The war will soon be over!' The tiny, malnourished child came into the world
with her little blood-smeared hands screwed up into fists held around her ears.
Priska was overjoyed, but also broken-hearted that her husband Tibor wasn't
there.
The couple, who had chosen
the names for their unborn child in a cramped railway cattle wagon on route to
Auschwitz, had been separated the moment they arrived.
Another set of twins
tortured and murdered by the depraved, psychotic evil man known as the 'Doctor
of Death.'
She was also petrified. Her
baby had been relatively safe inside her belly. Now she was a vulnerable Jewish
child in a world run by Nazis.
Her little girl was too weak
to cry and could barely move her puny limbs, but she had her father's big blue
eyes. 'She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen,' Priska said. 'We had
been through so much and yet here we were, alive!'
Neither would have survived
without the kindness of another inmate, a Czech paediatrician named Edita
Mautnerova, so Priska decided to call her baby Hana Edith Lowenbein. Her fellow
prisoners pooled their precious supply of their one occasional treat –
marmalade – and mixed it with a little water to make syrup for the baby. They
also found some soft white cotton stamped with the name of the camp – KZ
Freiberg – and stitched Hana a smock and a bonnet complete with blue edging and
tiny red flowers.
Then, 36 hours after she'd
given birth, Priska was shaken awake just after midnight and told the camp was
being evacuated to escape the advancing Soviet army. They were to be loaded on
to a train a sent south or west, possibly to Buchenwald, unless the Allies got
to it first.
Rachel Friedman was advised
to lie and say her son Mark (pictured together) was born on Hitler's birthday –
April 20th - and it saved him.
Thousands of inmates were
murdered, but others were allotted a different fate as the Nazi high command
clung to the belief that they would still need slave labour to rebuild the
Reich. Those given a chance to survive, like the women of KZ Freiberg, were
transported by train. The less fortunate were forced on long 'death marches' in
the middle of a brutally harsh winter.
Priska with her baby and 35
other sick women were among the last to leave. Initially they were ordered to
march in the freezing rain with the others. When it became clear they couldn't
keep up, the guards told the rest of the prisoners to move on.
'The others were convinced
they were going to execute us,' Priska said. 'They were saying goodbye and
crying.' But the women were loaded into a military truck and driven to the
station. Baby Hana was so lethargic she hardly moved. Trying to keep her warm,
Priska pressed her daughter against her heart, kissed her head and prayed.
'I told myself it is all in
the hands of God. He knew where I gave birth, so that's why he helped me.'
An SS
guard told me:
'Say the
boy was born on Hitler's birthday – April 20th. It might save him.'
- Rachel
Friedman
An SS guard told me: 'Say the
boy was born on Hitler's birthday – April 20th. It might save him'
Dr Mengele inspected each
new prisoner and – more specifically – asked if they were expecting a child,
which could become a subject for his sickening human experiments
She didn't know it until many
years later, but she was on the same train as Anka and Rachel, who were both
heavily pregnant and still hiding their condition. Rachel, now so fragile she'd
been placed on the floor of an open coal wagon with the dying 'like herrings in
a tin', was a few cars further along.
The only wagons available for
the 990 Jewish women were 15 open-topped trucks and a handful of closed cattle
cars. They were herded in, at least 60 to a truck, as grisly rumours of their destination
spread: were they to be buried alive or transported to an extermination camp in
Bavaria? As the Allies bombed tracks and liberated more camps, the journey
continued interminably.
On April 19, five days after
they had left Freiberg, in the middle of a night air raid, Rachel's waters
broke. Sprawled on the faeces-covered floor and sandwiched between the dead,
she gripped the arm of her sister Bala as the contractions took hold. A guard
called for help and someone found Dr Edita.
The boy was small. 'Another
Jew for the Fuhrer!' one of the guards shouted. Too weak to be happy, Rachel
felt numb. She had secretly decided to name him Max (later to be known as
Mark). 'I was thinking, 'So I have a child, or I don't have a child.' We didn't
know what was going to happen.'
With no sharp objects to
sever the umbilical cord, someone suggested Rachel bite through it. Eventually
an SS guard handed Edita a dirty razor blade. 'They also found a cardboard box
and put the baby in,' Rachel recalled.
Dr Mengele inspected each
new prisoner and – more specifically – asked if they were expecting a child,
which could become a subject for his sickening human experiments
Meanwhile Anka, a 'walking
skeleton in rags', was squeezed into an open-topped coal truck praying
fervently that they weren't on their way back to Auschwitz. With Allied planes
bombing tracks behind and ahead of them, there was mounting confusion among the
guards as to where the convoy has heading. Finally, after 16 terrible days,
Train 90124 ended its long journey on evening of Sunday, April 29, 1945.
The wild-looking creatures
still alive were dragged from the wagons by guards and pushed into ragged columns.
They were in the beautiful Danube valley, but all Anka could see were big black
letters spelling out MAUTHAUSEN.
'As soon as I saw that, my
birth pains started,' Anka said. 'I was so frightened.
'Mauthausen was in the same
category as Auschwitz: an extermination camp.'
Gripping the wagon door as
her contractions took hold, she tried not to let on that she was about to give
birth. All she could think was that she was about to deliver a child that would
be thrown straight into a gas chamber, along with its mother.
Dragged off with others too
weak to move, she was thrown on top of a heap of the dying on a farm cart.
'The sun was shining and it
was awfully cold – such a beautiful spring evening. We were going up the hill
and I noticed the Danube below and the [fields] beginning to turn green… I
thought I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life – maybe the last
nice thing I would see on this earth.'
By the time the cart had
climbed the two miles to the hilltop camp, her contractions had worsened.
'There were lice crawling all
over the place and dying women lying across my legs. I had only one fear – that
the baby wouldn't survive.'
In those hellish conditions,
Anka gave birth on the cart. The tiny infant didn't breathe or move. 'For maybe
seven to ten minutes it did not cry or stir,' she recalled.
At the so-called 'infirmary',
a prisoner who had been an obstetrician in Belgrade was summoned. 'He came
running out and he cut off the baby, smacked its bottom and everything was
fine. It started to cry. He told me, 'It's a boy.' Somebody wrapped it in paper
and suddenly I was terribly happy.'
In fact the doctor was wrong,
deceived by the swollen genitalia common in malnourished newborns, and Anka had
delivered a little girl she later named Eva. She asked someone the time and
date. In the sick bay she was grateful to be given her own bunk, even though
there was a stench of excrement.
The three 'miracle
children', Eva, Mark, and Hana (pictured l-r together) only learned of each
others' existence five years ago when they were reunited at an event for camp
survivors
The three 'miracle children',
Eva, Mark, and Hana (pictured l-r together) only learned of each others'
existence five years ago when they were reunited at an event for camp
survivors. There was no such joy for Rachel and baby Mark. They were
loaded on to a similar cart and taken up the hill to the camp, which was in
chaos. The population had doubled, food had virtually run out, disease was out
of control and the German guards were eager to leave no trace of their crimes.
Choking smoke filled the air as documents were thrown into incinerators, along
with the corpses of 43 prisoners executed the previous day.
Even with the odds stacked
hopelessly against them, the camp authorities seemed determined to continue
their campaign of genocide. Rachel and her group were herded 50 at a time down
a flight of steps to the showers. With baby Mark hidden under her grimy dress,
she remembered enough from Auschwitz to know what having a shower could mean.
Pushed into a large tiled chamber with sinister-looking pipes, she believed
that they were meant to die. 'They took us some place to gas us,' she said
afterwards, 'but the prisoners had dismantled the equipment so they couldn't do
it.' In fact, the camp had run out of the deadly Zyklon B cyanide crystals.
Meanwhile, Priska was forced
to march up the hill, her group beaten by the guards. When Hana stirred and
moaned, a female kapo (the name given to trusted inmates who supervised
prisoners) spotted the tiny bundle at Priska's breast and shrieked, 'Ein Baby!'
Another rushed forward to
grab Hana, crying 'Keine Kinder hier!' (No children here!). Priska fought them
both off, spitting and clawing at their faces as a deadly tug-of-war began.
Hana's life hung in the
balance until an unlikely person intervened. An older female kapo placed one
hand on Priska's shoulder and said quietly: 'I haven't seen a baby in six
years. I should like to spend some time with her.'
Priska realised that this was
a chance to save her child. She hesitated, then handed her over. 'Follow me,'
the woman said, in a Polish accent. In a surreal sequence of events, Priska was
ordered to wait outside the guards' barracks while the stranger took Hana
inside, undressed her and stood over her smiling and cooing. After almost an
hour, the guard wrapped Hana in her grimy smock and bonnet and carried her back
outside. 'Here,' she said brusquely before ordering that they be taken to a
vermin-ridden barracks.
Priska and Hana curled in
exhaustion on the floor of a filthy hut as Anka and her infant lay in the
infirmary and Rachel collapsed with Mark in a nearby barracks.
The following day, as Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, only Anka and her new baby, wrapped in newspaper, were shown any kind of care – although her infant stayed unwashed and surrounded by others dying of typhus or worse.
The following day, as Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, only Anka and her new baby, wrapped in newspaper, were shown any kind of care – although her infant stayed unwashed and surrounded by others dying of typhus or worse.
Dr Mengele conducted
sickening experiments on more than 1,500 sets of twins including Miriam and Eva
Kor
Dr Mengele conducted
sickening experiments on more than 1,500 sets of twins including Miriam and Eva
Kor.
Victims of Josef Mengele
recall the horrors at Auschwitz...
Anka said: 'By the time we arrived, the Germans were frightened out of their wits and started feeding us.'
She described their change of attitude as 'cloying and horrible', adding: 'I knew the day before they would have killed us.'
To her surprise, she was producing so much milk that she could have 'fed five babies'. 'I don't know where it came from. If I had faith I would say it was a miracle.'
Her baby, with arms the width of her little finger, guzzled greedily.
After weeks in which she had eaten not much more than a few mouthfuls of stale bread, Anka was given a bowl of macaroni swimming in fat. 'I was so hungry I ate it. I can't tell you how hungry I was… but it could have killed me on the spot. My intestines couldn't take it.' Almost immediately, she became incapacitated with diarrhoea and was extremely sick. 'How can you resist food when you are starving?'
In the early hours of May 3, SS commandant Frank Ziereis gave the order for his men to leave and handed over to a unit of police drafted in from Vienna, assisted by some older German soldiers. Two days later, a reconnaissance squad from the 'Thunderbolts', the 11th Armored Division, Third US Army, led by Polish-speaking Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek drove into the camp and found thousands of saucer-eyed prisoners, many on the verge of collapse. A huge number were naked, their skin covered in sores or eaten away by disease.
'It's a sight I'll never forget,' Sgt Kosiek said. 'They hardly resembled human beings. Some couldn't have weighed over 40lb… it made me wonder what kept them alive.'
Priska, who had been a language teacher, heard the voices of the soldiers and cried out for help in English. The medics rushed to the severely malnourished and dehydrated mother and baby. They took Hana away to operate on her abscesses and treated her with the new invention – penicillin. When a US Army nurse brought back the heavily bandaged bundle the following day, Priska thought she was dead. 'No, no! She's alive! She's healthy!' the nurse reassured her.
In the following weeks, as the three new mothers and their babies gradually regained strength and even began to gain a little weight, they were kept in quarantine in separate sections of the camp.
The three babies survived the horrors of the death camps, pictured is Auschwitz, the brutality of slave labour and a final terrifying journey before being liberated.
She described their change of attitude as 'cloying and horrible', adding: 'I knew the day before they would have killed us.'
To her surprise, she was producing so much milk that she could have 'fed five babies'. 'I don't know where it came from. If I had faith I would say it was a miracle.'
Her baby, with arms the width of her little finger, guzzled greedily.
After weeks in which she had eaten not much more than a few mouthfuls of stale bread, Anka was given a bowl of macaroni swimming in fat. 'I was so hungry I ate it. I can't tell you how hungry I was… but it could have killed me on the spot. My intestines couldn't take it.' Almost immediately, she became incapacitated with diarrhoea and was extremely sick. 'How can you resist food when you are starving?'
In the early hours of May 3, SS commandant Frank Ziereis gave the order for his men to leave and handed over to a unit of police drafted in from Vienna, assisted by some older German soldiers. Two days later, a reconnaissance squad from the 'Thunderbolts', the 11th Armored Division, Third US Army, led by Polish-speaking Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek drove into the camp and found thousands of saucer-eyed prisoners, many on the verge of collapse. A huge number were naked, their skin covered in sores or eaten away by disease.
'It's a sight I'll never forget,' Sgt Kosiek said. 'They hardly resembled human beings. Some couldn't have weighed over 40lb… it made me wonder what kept them alive.'
Priska, who had been a language teacher, heard the voices of the soldiers and cried out for help in English. The medics rushed to the severely malnourished and dehydrated mother and baby. They took Hana away to operate on her abscesses and treated her with the new invention – penicillin. When a US Army nurse brought back the heavily bandaged bundle the following day, Priska thought she was dead. 'No, no! She's alive! She's healthy!' the nurse reassured her.
In the following weeks, as the three new mothers and their babies gradually regained strength and even began to gain a little weight, they were kept in quarantine in separate sections of the camp.
The three babies survived the horrors of the death camps, pictured is Auschwitz, the brutality of slave labour and a final terrifying journey before being liberated.
The three babies survived
the horrors of the death camps, pictured is Auschwitz, the brutality of slave
labour and a final terrifying journey before being liberated
None of the women's husbands survived the camps and, with war over, the three
mothers went home.
Priska remained in Bratislava for five
years, and finally accepted that Tibor truly wasn't coming home. She never
remarried and became a professor of languages. Priska died in Slovakia in 2006
aged 90. Hana emigrated to Israel after the 'Prague Spring' uprising was
crushed in 1968. She now lives in California.
Rachel and her sisters found that in
their village in Poland most of the Jews she'd grown up with had been erased
from history, the survivors were unwelcome. She remarried, took Mark to
American-occupied Munich for four years, then to Israel and, finally, to
America. She died in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2003 at the age of 84.
Anka returned to Prague, where she
learned that Bernd had been shot on a death march from Auschwitz. Three years
later she married a Czech, Karel Bergman, who had been a wartime interpreter
for Fighter Command in London. They settled in Cardiff after her husband was
offered the chance to manage a factory in Wales, which he subsequently bought.
Anka died in Cambridge in 2013 aged 96.
None of the mothers went on to have more
children, none were aware of each others existence until their three 'babies'
attended a commemoration event at Mauthausen in 2010.
Anka was the only mother who lived long
enough to learn the truth and it was with high emotion that Eva introduced her
to Hana and Mark. With her eyes glistening, Anka told them: 'You are my
children too.'
Now all grandparents, the three 'miracle
babies' have, they say, become siblings of the heart.
All three will travel from their homes in
California, Wisconsin and Cambridge to meet again at Mauthausen next month to
mark their 70th birthdays and to thank the descendants of their liberators.
They are proud to be born survivors.
Born Survivors by Wendy Holden is published on May 7 by Sphere, priced £18.99.
Pre-order your copy at the special price of £15.19 from mailbookshop.co.uk;
p&p is free for a limited time only.
