Born Survivors would be an extraordinary book if it was the story of just one mother who gave birth in a Nazi concentration camp during the second world war. But it’s not. It’s the story of three mothers. Priska, Rachel and Anka. Who each had their babies whilst trying to evade death and face the loss of their freedom and the lives they knew. How they somehow managed to hide their pregnancies from the SS including Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. And that all three ended up at the same camp but knew nothing of one another. 

Wendy Holden spares no detail in the stories of the women. None. She’s put together a quite remarkable book on how Priska, Rachel and Anka each with their own incredible strength went from living in harmony with their friends and family, to being starved and beaten whilst led amongst the corpses of their fellow prisoners. The Holocaust was not place that a baby was meant to survive. They avoided gas chambers, being shot, dying from diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Men dragged from their wives, children and elderley taken from their families without having any idea that they would never see them again. 

How even when they were taken to work in a munitions factory, they prayed that they would be bombed so that not only would their own ordeal be over, but that it would take the lives of their captors too. 

Really, they were only saved by the Zyklon-B gas having run out just a day before they finally arrived at the horrific Mauthausen camp in Austria, which was liberated soon after by an American troop. 

Every bit of blood, sweat and tears shed by the mothers is on these pages. Interspersed with the pictures of those they loved and those who helped them.

What’s extra magical about Born Survivors is that the three babies, Hana, Mark and Eva, end up meeting with one another much later in life, and quite unexpectedly, automatically feel an incredible bond. Because even though they have no actual memory of the camp, they have it in common and bear the scars of what happened to them and their mothers both externally and internally. 

Three little miracles. In the most horrific of circumstances. Without their strong mothers, they would not have made it into this world. 

Born Survivors was originally released in 2015 but now being released as a special edition in commemoration of 75 years since the end of the war, I would recommend adding it to your tbr pile as soon as possible if you haven’t already read it. Published by Sphere (r.r.p. £8.99)  Paperback & eBook and Audiobook available.

Thank you to Sphere for letting me take part in this blog tour and for providing a copy of the book. 

Priska with Hana