“It’s Kate Thompson here, author of The Little Wartime Library and upcoming Wartime Book
Club.

“Wonderful, transformative things happen when you set foot in a library. In 2019 I uncovered the true story of a forgotten Underground library, built along the tracks of Bethnal Green Tube tunnel during the Blitz. As stories go, it was irresistible and the result was, The Little Wartime Library, my seventh novel.

“Bethnal Green Public Library, where the novel is set, was 100 years old in October 2022, and to celebrate the centenary of this grand old lady, funded by library philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, I set myself the challenge of interviewing 100 library workers. Speaking with one library worker for every year this library has been serving its community seemed a good way to mark this auspicious occasion. Because who better to explain the worth of a hundred-year- old library, than librarians themselves!”

“I wanted to explore the enduring value of libraries and reading. I quickly realised that librarians have the best stories.

“My research led me to librarians with over fifty years of experience, to the impressive women who manage libraries in prisons and schools, to those in remote Scottish islands. From poetry libraries overlooking the wide sweep of the Thames, to the 16th century Shakespeare’s Library in Stratford, via the small but mighty Leadhills Miners’ Library.

“This podcast was born out of those eye-opening conversations, because as Denise from Tower Hamlets Library told me: ‘If you want to see the world, don’t join the Army, become a librarian!’

“I’ll also be talking to international bestselling authors and some remarkable wartime women. This is my way of celebrating and documenting the remarkable stories I have found whilst researching my books.”

“Here is the link to my podcast site: 
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/from-the-library-with-love/id1705546837“

This is the one I have chosen to listen to and talk about:

I was born in a Nazi concentration camp

A powerful interview with 78-year-old Eva Clarke, who told me ‘You don’t know what you can withstand until you are put to the test.’

The strikingly handsome couple looked like they’d stepped straight out of a Hollywood motion picture from the glamorous golden era. The reality was somewhat different. Anka and Bernd met in Nazi occupied Prague, in 1940 and it was love at first sight across a crowded nightclub. Like it was for so many young couples in wartime a whirlwind courtship ensued followed by a wedding.

In December 1941, Anka and Bernd were amongst the first transports sent to Terezin, the first camp in Czechoslovakia where they remained for three years.

During their time at Terezin, and despite the sexes being segregated, Anka became pregnant with a son. When the Nazis discovered this they were forced to sign a document stating that when the baby was born, it would have to be handed over to the Gestapo to be murdered. In the event, her baby son died of pneumonia two months after his birth.

Anka fell pregnant again and this time tried her hardest to keep her pregnancy a secret, knowing full well what would happen should her SS captors discover it.

Soon after she fell pregnant, Bernd was deported to Auschwitz in Sept 1944. Heartbreakingly Anka followed him. She was the eternal optimist and thought that as they had survived that long nothing could get any worse…

Anka was at Auschwitz for ten days, a time she described as being like ‘Dante’s Inferno, hell on earth.’ Being young and fit, she was sent to work in a factory near Dresden as slave labour, never to see her husband again.

By the spring of 1945 the Germans were retreating and evacuating concentration and slave labour camps. Anka, by now looking like, in her words, ‘a scarcely living pregnant skeleton’ was transported on a filthy open coal wagon to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, a horrendous journey that took seventeen days. She weighed 5 stone. So horrified was she to see that she had arrived at yet another concentration camp she immediately went into labour.

It’s hard to conceive of the following scene. Anka, surrounded by the dead and dying, giving birth in the squalor of a coal wagon. An SS guard walked past and noticed. ‘Carry on screaming,’ he told her. Baby Eva came into a cruel world weighing just 3 pounds. Anka attributed her and her baby daughter’s survival to luck and timing.

The day before she gave birth the Nazis ran out of Zyklon B gas. The day after she gave birth Hitler committed suicide. Soon after Mauthausen was liberated by the Americans.

Returning to Prague with her tiny newborn baby girl, Anka stayed with relatives who had also survived the Holocaust. To her devastation she discovered her husband, parents, and two sisters had been murdered at Auschwitz.  Bernd was shot dead near Auschwitz in January 1945, just one week before the camp was liberated. He never knew his wife had fallen pregnant again.

Anka met Karel Bergman, a Czech who had fought with the RAF during the war, and moved to Cardiff in 1948 to start a new life.

78 years on, Eva shares her astonishing story. Please be warned, there are some distressing scenes described in this episode.

How I wish I’d met Eva’s extraordinary mother Anka who lived to 96 years old and never tired of telling her daughter ‘You don’t know what you can withstand until you are put to the test.”

My thoughts

I’m calling this my ‘thoughts’ rather than my review, because I’m basically listening and contemplating the terrible, horrific conditions under which Eva was born. It’s hard to believe that this happened, maybe not in my lifetime, but in my parents. My mother and grandmother lived in Vienna during the thirties and being Jewish, had to leave. Apart from being tear-gassed in a theatre, they managed to escape unharmed. They were lucky.

I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for those who did not escape. Many were shot or gassed. Those who survived were half-starved and beaten. Eva’s mother Anka spent 17 days on a train journeying to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. It was open to the elements. Anka went into labour on the coal wagon amongst the filth, the dead and the dying. You wonder how anyone at all survived. Hundreds did not.

Kate says that, “This is one of the most emotional interviews I’ve done. It reveals not only the depth of the atrocities committed in some of the foulest spots on earth,  but also that life hung on chance, degrees of fate, turn left, turn right, a flick of the whip. Buried within this story are also tiny fragments of humanity that have the power to change a life.”

Who would not be moved by this extraordinary story of hope and resilience in the face of the horror of war and the holocaust.

Eva and Kate discuss the importance of ‘I wish I’d asked’. Once the last of the survivors have passed away, there will be no-one else left to ask. However, many survivors of the war (not just the holocaust – my father was a prisoner-of-war in Siberia) don’t want to talk about it and we have to respect that. They also discuss how we must learn the lessons to prevent racism, prejudice, anti-semitism, hatred, genocide and more. I don’t think we have.

For more on this story read Born Survivors by Wendy Holden available to buy on Amazon.

Many thanks to @annecater for inviting me to be part of #RandomThingsTours

About Kate Thompson

Kate Thompson an award-winning journalist, ghostwriter and novelist who has spent the past two decades in the UK mass market and book publishing industry. Over the past eight years Kate has written eleven fiction and non-fiction titles, three of which have made the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list.

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