Born Survivors (48 page)

Nor was she able to find out why Bernd had been killed so close to the end of the war, although – after their five years in the camps – she appreciated that there was almost certainly no reason. Within days of his murder, the Red Army had arrived in the area around Gliwice, an event that would have liberated Bernd and reunited him with his pregnant wife.

The news that he was never coming home almost broke Anka, even if she could barely take it in after all she had been through. Her heart felt like stone but she refused to give in to despair. She had so many others to grieve for and so much else to consider, Eva most important of all. Somehow, she managed to pull herself together, put one foot in front of the other and get on with her life. ‘I didn’t have time to mourn. Somebody asked me, “How are you coping?” and I said, “I haven’t got time to cope. I have to do what’s necessary for everyday life,” which was more than enough because I didn’t know where my next penny would be coming from.’

She had more upsetting news. The maid to whom she’d entrusted her most precious belongings came to see her rather sheepishly to return Bernd’s clock and other items. But she confessed that she had sold the green silk curtains and burned all of Anka’s sacred
photographs because she feared they might incriminate her if ever they were found. ‘I could have killed her! Of all the things I wanted back, it was those.’ Having lost so much, material goods meant little or nothing to those who returned from the camps; but what did matter most terribly was memory. Personal mementos of their loved ones suddenly meant the world to them, Anka included, and her maid was telling her that all was lost. But she persisted and she went to the studio of the photographer – a fellow Jew – who’d taken their wedding photos. Although he had perished, the negatives were still in his files so she was able to have new ones printed.

Her priority, as always, was Eva. ‘I had her to think about and that’s what kept me going … She is the only thing which is mine really, always has been. We all love our daughters, but I feel this umbilical cord hasn’t been cut … I had to be here for her if I wanted her to live. I had to provide for what she needed, mentally and physically.’

When Olga and her family went on holiday that first summer after the war ended, Anka decided to go to Třebechovice pod Orebem and see what was left of her family home and business. All she knew was that it had been requisitioned. Accompanied only by her baby daughter, she went to Wilson Station and caught the train back to the place of her happiest childhood memories. ‘I had no money and I couldn’t work because Eva needed me so much. I decided that as I was the only heir of the whole family and there was the factory that was still working – even though it was now Communist property – I would tell them I had a little child and I would ask for something.’

When she reached the factory she was flooded with poignant memories of childhood summers, eating on the patio with her family or lying in a corner of the garden with a pillow reading a book. The tall brick chimney that she’d always been afraid might topple and kill them now reminded her of other more sinister chimneys; she could barely walk in its shadow.

She spoke to the Communist directors of the company and, to
her amazement, they agreed to pay her a small monthly stipend. ‘It was hardly anything but it was better than nothing.’ Her sister’s Bauhaus villa had also been requisitioned and was being used as living quarters for one of the workers – a staunch Communist – so she and Eva were allocated the corner of one small room, without access to the kitchen or bathroom and with hardly any furniture. ‘They treated me like a bitch.’

Although at first she relished the long-forgotten luxury of not being surrounded by hundreds of people and the joy of fresh untainted air, Anka was quickly overcome by loneliness. The voices of her voiceless family crowded in around her. Her dream of returning home to a place of laughter, warmth and beauty, and of being greeted with loving arms, had turned to a nightmare from which there would never be escape. The past was gone and she was in a new kind of camp almost as cruel as anything she had experienced.

Trapped in her tiny prison, she wasn’t even allowed to pluck a tomato from the enormous garden she’d frolicked in so merrily as a child. Worse still, one day when she took Eva out in a stroller someone had donated to her, a Czech grandmother she knew stopped and said cruelly, ‘It must be a Nazi baby!’ Her comment cut Anka to the quick, and she burst into tears and fled. ‘The Czechs treated me very badly and that hurt. These were people I grew up with. I didn’t expect anything else from the Germans, but the Czechs and the Communist rabble made me feel that I should have perished as well. It was awful.’

There were unexpected acts of kindness, though. When a few of her parents’ friends heard that Anka had survived they came, one by one, to pay their respects. She had no idea that Stanislav and Ida had entrusted their best silver and porcelain, rugs and jewellery to these people, who had bravely hidden them during the war. Anka was immensely touched to have these precious things returned to her and she thanked their friends for their honesty. ‘I got practically everything back.’ Even with those small acts of decency, though, being ‘home’ no longer felt the same. When her cousin Olga found
out how and where she was living, she insisted that she and Eva return to Prague. Soon afterwards, they were visited by a friend of her brother-in-law Tom Mautner, who arrived with food and clothes from England. His name was Karel Bergman, a Jewish maker of wigs and hairnets whose father had owned a factory; Anka had known Karel before the war, but he like Tom had fled to England, where he worked as an interpreter for Fighter Command.

With no place of her own and only a little money to live on, Anka was in an untenable situation. She couldn’t stay with Olga for ever and knew she would have to make her own way. When Karel began to show some interest, she was relieved, but it still took her three years to persuade him to marry her. ‘I knew that he was the man, not just for me – that wasn’t so important – but as a father for Eva. And if I ever was right, I was right in that.’ The couple eventually became engaged, but they couldn’t get married right away because she was still waiting for her Czech nationality to be reinstated.

Almost every day, Anka took Eva to the government offices to plead her case. She would park Eva’s pram outside while she went in to speak to the civil servants and return to find a crowd of adults cooing over her beautiful baby. Anka soon discovered, however, that it suited the authorities to obstruct her application, because if she wasn’t officially Czech then they would never have to give her the factory back or compensate her for its loss. One official she had been dealing with almost every day for three years asked her finally, ‘Do you even speak Czech?’ even though they had conversed in her mother tongue throughout.

As soon as she had finally persuaded the authorities that she was legitimately Czech again, on 20 February 1948, at the age of thirty, she became Mrs Karel Bergmanová. Her new husband was fifteen years older than her at forty-five. In 1939, he had fled the Protectorate and made his way to Britain to join the RAF, but he was too old to be a pilot so he had become an interpreter instead. Their wedding took place the same day as the Communist
putsch
that established a new political order in Czechoslovakia.

Anka’s wedding to Karel Bergman 1948

As soon as the newlyweds could legally leave the country, they packed up Eva and their few belongings and caught a train across Germany to Holland, planning to join other Czech refugees in Montreal, Canada. But once in Holland (where they were briefly reunited with Bernd’s blind father Louis, who’d survived the war), they were diverted to Wales by a temporary job offer for Karel to supervise a glove factory there. Within five years he ended up buying the factory and the couple never left. From their earliest days living in a small furnished flat on the first floor of a building in Cathedral Road, Cardiff, Anka loved her home and her new life in a country where she felt free and safe. ‘It was a sub-standard flat, a dreadful shabby place, but I have never been so happy. I didn’t have a penny. How I managed, I don’t know. I thought mostly of my mother who would be pleased it turned out right.’

One thing she especially loved was rekindling her love of the
cinema. Whenever Eva was in nursery or at school, she went to the cinema on her own – almost every single day. ‘It doesn’t matter what’s on,’ she’d say. ‘It’s just that I can.’

Small, undernourished and poorly, Eva appeared to be rather slow physically and at twenty-two months old she still couldn’t walk. Anka rushed her from one paediatrician to another, fearing that there might be some lasting damage. She was especially tormented by the progress of a friend’s daughter, who was at least six months ahead. Her tough little daughter gradually gained her strength, though, and soon ‘caught up admirably’. She went to a school where she didn’t understand a word of the language but at five she was fluent and started winning awards. Health-wise, she seemed otherwise unscathed and developed a normal appetite, especially enjoying the Czech dishes her mother made so well – many of which she had learned how to cook with imaginary ingredients in the barracks.

The chief legacy of Eva’s time in the camps was that she would become hysterical if ever she heard a pneumatic drill. Anka would have to ask workmen to stop, or cover her daughter’s ears in order to calm her down. She eventually figured out that Eva must have heard the pneumatic riveting machines at KZ Freiberg while she was in the womb.

Eva was told of her family history from an early age but she didn’t discover that Karel wasn’t her real father until she was four years old. Hanging on the back of the kitchen door was a shopping bag that someone had made for her mother in Prague, which bore the letters AN: Anka Nathanová.

Her mother explained, ‘We were in the kitchen and she said, “Mummy, what does A.N. stand for, because shouldn’t it be A.B.?” I thought that this was the moment I would tell her so I said, “You’ve heard about the war?” And she nodded, so I said, “Well, your father was killed in that war and his surname was Nathan … Afterwards I married Daddy and since then I have been called Bergman, so you have two Daddies!” Eva went downstairs to play with the other
children and within a minute I heard her say, “I have two Daddies and you only have one!” And from then on I knew that nobody could hurt her.’

Anka and Eva in Cardiff 1952

Later, once Eva found out more, she often told people she was born in a concentration camp, though without realising the true significance of the statement. It was only when she read Anne Frank’s
Diary of a Young Girl
as a teenager that she began to understand the full horror of what she was saying. Occasionally, she fantasised that her first Daddy had secretly survived the war and would come back into their lives, but she loved her second Daddy so dearly that such fantasies were rare.

Anka had offered to have a baby with her new husband but he
turned her down and offered instead to adopt Eva, whom he always thought of as his own. ‘All my mother wanted was to create a loving home for me,’ said Eva. ‘So Karel adopted me and he was the only father I ever knew.’

Karel, who had lost his mother, his twin sister and her son along with the rest of his family during the war, rarely, if ever, spoke of his losses. Anka, however, became almost obsessed and saw nearly every film and documentary about the Holocaust. She watched
Schindler’s List
when it was first released and described the camp scenes as ‘more or less perfect’. One episode especially moved her. It was the moment when the Jews were crowded into the cattle trucks with the doors bolted. Nazis stood laughing as prisoners’ hands poked through the cracks pleading for water, at which point Schindler grabbed a hosepipe and sprayed the carriages as if it was another act of cruelty, when in fact he had appreciated their thirst.

She had shelves of books on the Holocaust, several featuring photographs of Josef Mengele, who – like Rachel and Priska – she immediately recognised as the unusually polite, smiling doctor with the gauntlets and the gap between his teeth who had carried out selections in Auschwitz during those few key weeks in the latter half of 1944. There were numerous biographies of other senior Nazis in her bookcase too, a fact which often surprised people. Whenever she was asked why she had them she said, ‘Because I’m still trying to find out why.’ She also studied the lists of those killed at Terezín and Auschwitz, running her finger down the pages to see how and when those she’d known had lived and died.