Born Survivors (50 page)

A few minutes later, Pete somehow sensed Hana’s presence. He stopped talking, turned to the stranger at his side and, with tears in his eyes, said quietly, ‘Hana.’

The two embraced for several minutes, neither able to speak.

‘I thought she was going to kill me, she hugged me so tight!’ Pete said.

It had been sixty years since they had last met and Hana couldn’t have remembered a thing about it, but clasping the hand of the medic who’d persuaded his superior officer to try to save her life in that place where so many others were in equally urgent need of their attention proved to be one of the most moving experiences of both their lives. Her face wet with tears, Hana told him that she loved him and she thanked him for keeping her alive. She showed him some of the scars on her arms and chest from the surgery she’d undergone at the field hospital.

Pete, too, felt the emotion of their reunion deeply. Within weeks of the liberation of Mauthausen, he’d sat down at a typewriter and begun writing up his experiences, augmenting them with scores of photographs that he had taken. Even at such a young age, he had appreciated the importance of eyewitness testimony.

Hana meets US medic who saved her in Mauthausen, 2009

The process had taken its toll. In an interview he gave to historian Michael Hirsch in 2008, Pete said, ‘I had a breakdown [in Mauthausen] … I had put in long hours and … I needed some rest … I bled from the nose, I bled from the inner ears, and I just couldn’t sleep … I had two days that my officer ordered me to rest. I am still fighting today … because I have a mental condition that needs to be taken care of … when I go to bed at night. I think I’m going to get a good night’s sleep and then the bodies start to appear … the piles of dead bodies and the rats eating them … I’m seeing … psychiatrists but I don’t know what else they can do for me … Over the years it has grown worse … I guess I’ll just carry it to my grave.’

Hana asked for any news about Major Stacy but discovered that, sadly, he’d passed away. Further enquiries with the major’s family disclosed that, like so many servicemen, he had never spoken of his wartime experiences. Nor did he mention the baby he’d helped to save.

As Pete and Hana talked some more, he was finally able to give her an explanation as to why her mother kept asking in her confusion, ‘Will you forgive me?’ He believed it might have been related to the fact that Priska had ‘given up’ her baby twice, first to the
Kapo
when she arrived at the camp and then to the doctors – each time not knowing what the outcome would be. ‘Pete told me that my mother was so “gracious” and knew that they were trying to help but he added, “I was amazed what she did – she just handed you over to me. She didn’t know she would ever see you again. She trusted me to save you and bring you back.” I think that is what she felt guilty about.’

Hana affectionately dubbed Pete ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy Pete’, and the two kept in touch via email and telephone for the next few years. In one email to her not long after their reunion in 2005, he wrote of his trip to Europe:

Overall, it was great and the very best was when you and I got to meet each other for the second time after sixty years and the happy moments that came back to me, and finding the answer to the question I often asked myself – did things work out? – and prayed that everything was a success for your sake. The duties I had performed in the field had come to an end. I prayed that all those I had taken care of survived and that I had guessed right in treatment. Then there was the baby at Mauthausen, there was much to wonder about and try to put behind me, but I must confess the baby entered my mind many, many times.

Sadly, Priska was too unwell to meet Pete and thank him herself. She died a year later. Hana remained in contact, however, and visited him at his home just before his death aged eighty-eight in 2010, not long after she’d been made an honorary lifetime member of the 11th Armored Division Association. Pete left four sons, thirteen grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Even though he’d had a
difficult time after the war, LeRoy Petersohn always said that the fact that he’d saved a baby was the most positive experience of it all.

As one door closed for Hana, so another one opened. In 2008, Eva Clarke, the sixty-three-year-old daughter of Anka (who was still alive aged ninety), happened across the 11th Armored Division website herself and decided to reach out. In an email dated Tuesday 20 May, she wrote and thanked the US soldiers for liberating her and her mother. She added:

I was born in Mauthausen on 29th of April 1945. My mother, Anka Bergman, says that hundreds of photographs were taken of us by US soldiers but we have never found any. We would be most grateful to hear of the existence of any mother and baby photos. Our story features in the Thunderbolt.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Hana spotted the article and could hardly believe what she was reading. Another baby? Born in Mauthausen? Before they were liberated? Since the publication of a German book cataloguing the records that were left of KZ Freiberg, she’d been aware that – incredibly – there had been other pregnant women in Freiberg and on the train, including a Polish
Kapo
, but it was her understanding that none of the babies and not all of the mothers had survived. (Years later she found out about one baby born in Mauthausen after liberation and named Robert after the Belgrade obstetrician who’d delivered him. The child lived for only a few weeks and his mother, Gerty Kompert, the cousin of survivor Lisa Miková, was also dead.)

Via the Thunderbolts’ website, Hana responded to Eva’s post and the two ‘babies’ – who lived more than 6,000 kilometres apart – were finally connected. Eva, too, was shocked to think that there was somebody else out there in the world whose mother had gone through the same ordeal. She found Hana’s original letter in an old edition of
Thunderbolt
and couldn’t get over the similarities between their mothers’ experiences. Priska and Anka had been just two prisoners among thousands who never met or were even aware of one another, and yet they had each miraculously given birth to babies who – even more remarkably – survived.

After a series of emails between the two of them and the Austrian authorities who’d turned KZ Mauthausen into an impressive memorial site in the 1960s (partly at the urging of the Thunderbolts), Hana and Eva both agreed to attend the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the camp on 8 May 2010. It was to be the last time that the surviving American veterans made an official visit because of their diminishing numbers and the age and infirmity of those who were left. The numbers of those who’d been liberated were also dwindling, so officials at the Austrian Ministry of the Interior in Vienna were planning a huge event attended by several heads of state. When the veterans’ website announced the details, plus the exciting news that both Eva and Hana would be attending, another door was opened.

Across the country, a young man in New York who’d been trawling through the site to find out more about the men who liberated his father spotted the bulletin. Charlie Olsky, thirty-two, was Mark and Mary’s youngest son. Head of publicity at a Manhattan film distribution company, Charlie was the family’s unofficial historian and the one who’d been able to get more information from his grandmother Rachel than almost anyone else. It was Charlie who’d walked through the rooms of the Yad Vashem with her as a boy, and it was he who decided to organise a birthday surprise for his father.

‘Charlie told me, “I’m going to Mauthausen for your sixty-fifth birthday and you’re coming with me,”’ said Mark. ‘I had never been back there since 1945 even though I’d been within thirty miles of it when I visited Dachau. I’d asked Mom a couple of times if she’d like to go back but she always said it was the last thing in the world she wanted. She told me, “That was an evil, horrible, ugly camp. Yet even more depressing than the place itself was that just outside was one of the most beautiful spots in the world.”’

Unbeknown to Mark, Charlie had planned their whole trip, as well as the ‘reunion’ with Hana and Eva, down to the last detail. Then, a few days before they left (and on the advice of his mother Mary, who was concerned at Mark’s reaction to such a surprise), he let his father in on the secret.

‘He said, “I have something to tell you,” and then he told me about the two other “babies” born in the camps and said he’d been communicating with them and that I would be able to meet them in Mauthausen. I was stunned. Although my mother had heard there were babies in the camp, she never saw them and didn’t know if she believed it. As a doctor, I hadn’t even thought about the possibility that other children could have survived that transport as I did. I really didn’t have a chance to absorb the information before we were on the plane.’

It was on the flight from New York to Europe with Charlie that Mark had time to consider the forthcoming encounter and wonder what the two other ‘babies’ might be like. ‘My first thought was that they were two random individuals who had nothing in common with me apart from our age and where and how we were born. I told myself not to build up too many expectations. I talked myself down and said it will be nice, but they’re probably not people you’d want to live next door to.’

The officials and organisers at Mauthausen warmly welcomed the ‘babies’ when they arrived and arranged for them to be put up in hotels in Linz before the daylong commemoration services began the following morning. Within hours of settling in, the three of them arranged to meet at a café on the historic main square for which Hitler had once had such grand plans; each of them felt surprisingly nervous.

Eva and her husband Malcolm arrived early, took their seats at a table and waited. Hana walked in first with her husband and then Mark and Charlie arrived.

‘We said hello and suddenly we were laughing and crying all at the same time,’ said Eva. ‘It was amazing. When we found one another
and all met there for the first time it was an incredible reunion. It felt completely natural and we formed a real emotional bond.’

The three survivors stayed in the café talking all afternoon while Charlie filmed the whole thing. Diplomatically, Hana and Eva’s husbands slipped away so that the children of Priska, Rachel and Anka could each talk about their mothers and what they had been told of their births. They parted only reluctantly and a few hours later met again for dinner at a local restaurant, where they carried on chatting like old friends.

Eva, Mark, and Hana meet in Mauthausen 2010

Mark said, ‘We met and they were both nice and sweet and pretty and pleasant and cute. Then we got talking and I thought, “Hey, these are really interesting, wonderful people! This isn’t just a coincidence. They have interesting lives and, yes, they feel like family!” They were the sort of people I would love to have as my friends. I can’t explain it but I felt reunited – instantly we had a really nice warm friendship. It was like meeting my family. The sad
part was that because of dispersion of everyone after the war, we were never to meet until then.’

Having each been raised as an only child, all three survivors felt the same unexpected sense of fellowship and knew, straight away, that they’d always remain close. Mark said, ‘It’s amazing to have people who share the same story. There are so many who didn’t make it or who were killed or tortured. We made it. I feel like one of those people who has been abducted from my original family and suddenly we’ve been reunited!’

Hana said, ‘We’ve been brought together by chance but we now have a permanent bond and feel such a sense of togetherness. I am absolutely delighted to call them my sister and brother.’ She likes to joke with her new ‘siblings’ that – as the eldest (born on 12 April 1945) – she should be offered the most respect. Mark (born on 20 April) counters that, as the only boy, he warrants their highest esteem. Eva (born on 29 April) is the baby, and enjoys reminding her siblings how much younger she is. ‘Our mothers were all very strong women and we are very grateful for that,’ she adds.

The following day they travelled together to the Mauthausen Memorial, where they each felt the weight of history on them. Although she was the only one to have visited the camp before, Eva still felt especially emotional staring up at the forbidding entrance in the shadow of whose gates she’d been born. The barracks down the hill into which sickly Hana and Mark had been thrown with their mothers and left to die no longer existed, but the views across the Austrian hills to the Alps were just as their late mothers had described.