The Holocaust’s youngest survivors: born in a labor camp, on a death train, and in a concentration camp

Last spring marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and the liberation of the last remaining Nazi concentration camps. It might feel, nearly a century later, as though there are few Holocaust survival stories left to tell. But then we found this one.

It begins with three young women who were married and newly pregnant in 1944 when they were sent to the notorious death camp Auschwitz, then assigned to work as slave laborers in Germany. With pregnancy an offense punishable by death in the camps, the story of how these three women managed to deceive their Nazi captors and give birth to three tiny babies — who are now 80 years old — involves narrow misses, seemingly impossible twists of fate and luck, unimaginable suffering, and miracles.

Lesley Stahl: Everyone keeps calling you the babies.

Mark Olsky: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: And you’re 80.

Mark Olsky: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: Are you okay with that–

Mark Olsky: Oh yes.

Hana Berger-Moran: Oh yeah.

Eva Clarke: Absolutely. We’re proud of it.

Hana Berger-Moran: Totally.

Eva Clarke, Hana Berger-Moran, and Mark Olsky are among – if not the – youngest survivors of the Holocaust.

Hana Berger-Moran: April 12th.

Mark Olsky: April 20.

Eva Clarke: April 29th.

Born in April 1945, just before Germany’s surrender in May. At the time, they were Nazi prisoners, but their story begins long before that, when Eva’s mother Anka, from Czechoslovakia; Mark’s mother Rachel, from Poland; and Hana’s mother Priska, also from Czechoslovakia, were young Jewish women in a world that was about to be shattered.

Hana Berger-Moran: My dear late mother grew up in a small town. And her parents were owners of a little café, little Jewish café.

Mark Olsky: She had eight siblings.

Mark’s mother was from a textile manufacturing town; Eva’s from east of Prague.

Eva Clarke: She was a champion swimmer, junior backstroke swimming champion of Czechoslovakia.

Lesley Stahl: For the whole country?

Eva Clarke: For the whole country, yeah.

Lesley Stahl: Wow.

And they each fell in love with their husbands as Europe was descending into war.

Hana Berger-Moran: My late father was a journalist.

Lesley Stahl: How did they meet?

Eva Clarke:They met, I believe, in a nightclub–

Lesley Stahl: Oh.

Eva Clarke: –across a crowded room.

Mark Olsky: She avoided going into details. She talked about things..

Mark’s mother never told him much about his father, but she did speak of him to Mark’s son, her grandson Charlie.

Charlie Olsky: She told me that I looked like him. And I said, “Really?” And she said, “But that’s it. He was so elegant. You’re nothing like him.”

Lesley Stahl: And you’re not.

Charlie Olsky: Um.. 

But soon after the newly married couple moved into their first apartment in Warsaw, German soldiers came one morning and seized it.

Charlie Olsky: She was still in her nightgown. She said she still had her toothbrush. And she was just sent into the streets.

Hana Berger-Moran: They took my grandparents in 1942, my– my aunt in 1943.

As the Nazis occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia, Jews were rounded up in Ghettos and sent to camps. Mark’s parents spent much of the war in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. Eva’s were sent to a Czech camp called Terezin, where she was conceived, in violation of camp rules.

Eva Clarke: To become pregnant in a concentration camp was considered a crime by the Nazis.

Lesley Stahl: For a Jewish person to get pregnant was a crime?

Eva Clarke: A crime, because, you know, they were trying to murder– they were trying to annihilate every member of the Jewish people.

By mid-to-late 1944, the killings had accelerated. Remaining ghettos were liquidated, and all three women, newly pregnant, were loaded from different cities onto packed freight cars headed for Auschwitz, Hana’s mother alongside her husband.

Hana Berger-Moran: They were sitting in the train on the floor. And my mother is saying, “If it’s a girl, it’s going to be Hana. If it’s a boy, it will be Michael.”

Lesley Stahl: This is on the train to Auschwitz–

Hana Berger-Moran: On the train to Auschwitz.

Lesley Stahl: Did they know anything about Auschwitz?

Hana Berger-Moran: Oh, they did. They already knew those were death camps.

The arrival platform at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was a place of unimaginable cruelty. Families were ripped apart, with most, including mothers with children and the elderly, sent straight to death in gas chambers that at their peak murdered 6,000 people a day. The lucky few selected for work, including the three women, were stripped, shaven, and sent to overflowing barracks.

Lesley Stahl: Did your mother ever see your father again?

Hana Berger-Moran: Once, about a week after sh– they got there. She saw him across the– barbed wire fence. And my dad said to her, “Be careful and think only good thoughts.” “Think only good thoughts.” He just kept repeating that sentence.

Lesley Stahl: And that’s the last time they ever saw each other?

Hana Berger-Moran: Yeah. I wish I would have known him.

Prisoners endured frequent selections, some by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known for his gruesome experiments on camp inmates.

Hana Berger-Moran: When Mengele came by– 

Lesley Stahl: She met Mengele?

Hana Berger-Moran: She did. And Mengele is looking at her. She’s standing in the– in the line with other women. 

Lesley Stahl: Yeah.

Hana Berger-Moran: Unfortunately, naked. And he looks at her and says in German, “Good looking woman. Are you pregnant?” And my mother says, “Nein, I’m not.”

Wendy Holden: Each of them at that moment had to decide whether to confess that they were or to deny it, whether that would save them and their unborn child or not.

Author Wendy Holden has studied Auschwitz and written a book about the three babies and their mothers.

Wendy Holden: Each of them sensed that they were in the presence of great danger, and they each denied it.

Lesley Stahl: All three women lied to Mengele, and all three women get sent to a slave labor camp in Germany.

Wendy Holden: Freiberg, Saxony, yes.

Lesley Stahl: Did the three ever meet?

Wendy Holden: No, and they never knew about each other. It was so important that they didn’t reveal their pregnancies.

They were among more than a thousand women prisoners working 12-hour shifts in a massive converted porcelain factory, manufacturing parts for German fighter planes.

Wendy Holden: Living on really diet of water– ersatz coffee in the morning, and thin soup, and then maybe a tiny piece of bread every day.

Lesley Stahl: How did they hide their pregnancy?

Wendy Holden: They were given, each of them at Auschwitz, clothing from those who’d been gassed. And they, each of them fortunately ended up with– with baggy dresses.

Eva Clarke: During the six months she was there, she was becoming progressively more and more starved and more and more obviously pregnant. But fortunately, none of the Germans realized she was pregnant, because had they done so, they might well have sent her back to Auschwitz to be killed. 

But by the early spring of 1945, the Allies were advancing, Auschwitz had been liberated, and plans were being made to get rid of the slave laborers.

Wendy Holden: The Germans decided they had to eradicate the evidence, and they were going to send them to be gassed, and just kill them all. 

Lesley Stahl: They knew they were losing, the Germans. They knew that the Americans or the Russians were going to come in. 

Wendy Holden: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: And they did not want them to know how badly they had treated these people.

Wendy Holden: Very much so, and also there was no more work. The– all the materials had dried up. They didn’t– they weren’t really even feeding them anymore. 

That’s when Hana’s mother went into labor on the factory floor.

Wendy Holden: On a plank that was put across a table. And the guards watched. And they took bets on whether it was going to be a boy or a girl.

Lesley Stahl: The guards watched the baby being born?

Wendy Holden: Yes. 

Hana Berger-Moran: My mom said it was like a show. And I said, “Mom, were you embarrassed?” “I didn’t have chance to be embarrassed. You were being born. That was all that mattered to me.” 

Thirty six hours later, the slave laborers – and newborn Hana – were loaded onto the same train.

Eva Clarke: This time it was in open coal wagons. So open to the skies, and filthy. 

Lesley Stahl: This was the death train.

Hana Berger-Moran: It was the death train. They were looking for a camp where they could kill all these women. 

Eva Clarke: She said it was a nightmare of a journey. 

Sixteen days on the train.

Eva Clarke: No food and hardly any water.

Lesley Stahl: She’s nine months pregnant, effectively–

Eva Clarke: Yes. And at one point, the train was stopped, and the doors were opened, and a farmer walked by, and he saw my mother. And he had such a shock. My mother described herself as looking like a scarcely-living pregnant skeleton. And this farmer brought her a glass of milk. She maintained that saved her life. Who knows.

Charlie Olsky: My grandmother, in the meantime, had gotten so ill. She was under 70 pounds and nine months pregnant. And they put her in the sick car.

Lesley Stahl: Did people die in this car?

Charlie Olsky: Yes.

Mark Olsky: I mean, they literally threw them off the train.

Charlie Olsky: Yeah. She was lying down, and there was a woman with a bad leg, and they ha– she had to put her leg up on her pregnant stomach, ’cause that was the highest place in the train to rest it.

Lesley Stahl: So she’s surrounded by dying people, and gives birth with a woman’s foot on her stomach. I mean, this is– beyond inhumanity.

Charlie Olsky: Yes.

Charlie Olsky: Somehow she gave birth. She didn’t think she would.

Lesley Stahl: She thought she was going to die.

Charlie Olsky: And she figured she would’ve given birth to a dead baby; that her body couldn’t sustain it. But he was alive. And she figured, “But I won’t have milk,” but she did.

She learned the date was April 20th.

Charlie Olsky: Somebody announced on the train, “Ah, it’s Hitler’s birthday today.” And so that was his birthday.

Lesley Stahl: You were born on Hitler’s birthday?

Mark Olsky: Yes.

After nine more days on that train, they reached a camp in Austria that was meant to be their end: Mauthausen, one of the last camps standing. Eva’s mother went into labor just as the train arrived.

Eva Clarke: She had to climb off the coal truck, unaided. She had to climb onto a cart, because the prisoners who were not strong enough to walk up the steep hill to the camp, they had to get on carts, and they were pulled up by others. 

Lesley Stahl: I think I would give up. I’m– I’m sure I would give up–

Eva Clarke: Well, that’s what I used to say to my mother, that I would’ve given up at the first hurdle. I would’ve collapsed. She said, “You have no idea.” She said, “You just don’t know what you can withstand until you have to.” And she said, “And fortunately, most people are not tested.”

Wendy Holden: She was hauled up through the wooded valley.

Lesley Stahl: While she’s in labor?

Wendy Holden: While she’s in labor.

Lesley Stahl: Oh my gosh.

Wendy Holden: And she remembers looking back, you look down onto the River Danube. It was April, so there were blossoms and birds singing. And she said she thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. And she also thought it would be the last thing she’d ever see.

But it wasn’t the last thing she’d see, for a stunning reason. The last day the gas chambers at Mauthausen were used was the day before. 

Eva Clarke: On the 28th of April, 1945, the Nazis had run out of gas.

Lesley Stahl: So wait, you arrived one day after the gas ran out?

Eva Clarke: Ran out. So had the train arrived on the 26th or 27th, none of us would’ve survived.

Lesley Stahl: Every little tiny factor of this story is amazing.

Wendy Holden: Yes. Well, I call them the miracle babies, and with very good reason.

Miraculous too, that they managed to survive at Mauthausen for almost a week — baby Hana with infected sores all over her body — until finally help arrived.

Hana Berger-Moran: My mom, she saw a little green army car and music. “Roll out the barrels, da-da-da-da-da-da.” And she said, “This is not German.”

Lesley Stahl: She knew the song?

Hana Berger-Moran: Oh, yeah. And suddenly, young soldier with a helmet, red cross on it, comes walking by, and my mother says to him in English, “I have something to show you.”

That “something” was Hana.

Hana Berger-Moran: He said to my mother in English, “I’ll get the doctor because your baby needs help.” And he ran and brought the doctor. They took me.

Lesley Stahl: Wait, they took you off and left her without you?

Hana Berger-Moran: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: And she let them do that?

Hana Berger-Moran: Yes. Yes, she did. She trusted them.

Lesley Stahl: Wow.

Hana Berger-Moran: And the next day, a nurse came, me wrapped in bandages, and my mother says, “Is she dead?

Lesley Stahl: Oh.

Hana Berger-Moran: And the nurse said, “No. No, she’s not. She’s sleeping.”

Hana’s mother never forgot that young American medic who saved her baby’s life, and it turns out, that medic never forgot Hana either.

Brian Petersohn: He always mentioned, “I wonder whatever happened to the baby.”

Lesley Stahl: Really?

Brian Petersohn: Yes.

The heroism of American fighters in the fierce battles of World War II is legendary. But for some of those young soldiers, among their most searing wartime memories were what they witnessed after the shooting stopped, when they entered Nazi concentration camps as liberators.

One of those camps was Mauthausen, a fortress-like compound high on a hill west of Vienna, where more than 95,000 prisoners died — and where three babies and their mothers arrived on April 29, 1945.

Six days later, a small unit of two dozen soldiers from the 11th Armored Division of Gen. Patton’s Third Army was checking bridges in the area when they came upon the camp almost by accident. A warning: the images of what they found are disturbing. One of the soldiers that day was a 22-year-old medic from Illinois named Leroy “Pete” Petersohn.

Lesley Stahl: This is the scrapbook that he kept?

Brian Petersohn: This is one of a couple. 

Pete Petersohn was drafted into the Army in 1942.

Brian Petersohn: My dad was a– a humble man. He always had a smile.

Brian Petersohn is Pete’s youngest son. He and his two sons have been re-building an Army-style Jeep that used to be his dad’s.

Son (off camera): You know, Grandpa’s gonna–

Brian: He’s gonna — he’ll be smiling on us.

Petersohn lived through a jeep explosion..

Brian Petersohn: That is the exact time.

Lesley Stahl: When the Jeep was blown up.

Brian Petersohn: That’s when the Jeep was blown up.

Lesley Stahl: And he survived.

And fought in the Battle of the Bulge, before his unit liberated Mauthausen. He suffered, years later, from PTSD.

Lesley Stahl: Do you think it was from the battles? Or do you think it was from the camps?

Brian Petersohn: From the camps– the smells and the sounds and the sights that– that bothered him.

This official U.S. Army photo of Americans liberating Mauthausen captures the joy of prisoners finally being freed, but the photos Peterson kept in his scrapbook show a far darker reality.

Lesley Stahl: He took these?

Brian Petersohn: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: Oh. 

Piles of emaciated corpses.. 

Lesley Stahl: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 

And in this photo, a man who died right in front of Petersohn’s eyes.

Lesley Stahl: And look at this man. I mean, how are they–

Brian Petersohn: Just skin and bones.

Lesley Stahl: How– yeah.

Petersohn’s job was to triage which inmates could be helped, when he came upon a shocker outside one of the barracks.

Brian Petersohn: A woman presented her baby to him and showed him that she was badly infected.

Lesley Stahl: He’s now just seen all these dead bodies. And there’s a baby.

Brian Petersohn: This one we have to try to save.

Petersohn told Brian that he and the unit doctor used penicillin — brand new at the time — to treat the baby’s wounds and helped sew her up. He never got the incident out of his mind.

Brian Petersohn: Literally, every time that we looked at this book, that was his final thoughts. “I wonder whatever happened to that baby.”

In the weeks after liberation, that baby, and her mother, like many freed prisoners, traveled back to their hometowns across Europe in hopes of finding living family members — and in Mark’s, Eva’s, and Hana’s mothers’ cases, their husbands. Sadly, all three men had died. While Mark’s and Eva’s mothers later remarried, none of the women had other children..

So Mark Olsky, Eva Clarke, and Hana Berger-Moran grew up as only children, learning about the war in bits and pieces from their mothers.

Mark Olsky: I was told that I had been– that I was born on a train. But not– no details. And so I thought, “Oh, hey, cool, I’m born– I was born on a train.”

But as he learned the truth, he became enraged.

Mark Olsky: When I was 12, 13 people asked me, “What do you want to do with your life?” And I said, “I want to go to Europe and just kill as many Germans as I can.”

Lesley Stahl: [raises eyebrows]

Mark Olsky: Yes.

He vividly remembers his mother’s response.

Mark Olsky: In almost the exact words, she said, “They took so much from us. If this is what you become like, they will have taken your soul.” 

Lesley Stahl: Oh, she said that to you? Wow. Wow.

Hana’s mother raised her in Czechoslovakia, but as an adult, Hana moved to Israel, then to the United States for graduate school. Her mother sent her off with a request: try to track down that young American medic.

Hana Berger-Moran: And she says, “Please find him.”

Lesley Stahl: Find him?

Hana Berger-Moran: –“find him.”

Lesley Stahl: How were you supposed to do that?

Hana Berger-Moran: I didn’t know his name.

She discovered it was the 11th Armored Division that liberated Mauthausen and sent them a letter.

Hana Berger-Moran: I was getting various messages. This name, that name. I got in touch with them. “Oh no, it’s not me.” And finally, I get the message, “Oh. You want to talk to– to Pete Petersohn.” 

Petersohn was 81 at the time.

Brian Petersohn: Dad mentioned that he had heard from a woman– that he believes is the baby that he saved at Mauthausen.

Lesley Stahl: Oh my God. 

They met in May 2005, 60 years after their first meeting.

Hana Berger-Moran: I was so happy to finally touch him, see him. 

Brian Petersohn: He was actually staring and looking at her.

Lesley Stahl: I saved that person.

Hana Berger-Moran: That’s you, that’s you, that’s really you.

Hana Berger-Moran: And I was able to thank him finally. Truly thank him because he saved my life. He did. 

Lesley Stahl: Do you think knowing that she survived helped with the PTSD, in any way?

Brian Petersohn: Oh absolutely. That lifted a big weight off of him.

Hana Berger-Moran: And I asked him if I can call him Daddy Pete.

Lesley Stahl: Daddy Pete?

Hana Berger-Moran: I didn’t have a father, you know? So he became my daddy.

Lesley Stahl: He adopted you.

Hana Berger-Moran: Well, he had no choice.

Lesley Stahl: You adopted him, let me put it that way. 

Pete Petersohn died five years later. Hana spent a week with him during his final illness.

Lesley Stahl: What’s your relationship now?

Brian Petersohn: She’s my big sister.

Hana Berger-Moran: Exactly. And he better listen.

Lesley Stahl: To his big sister?

Brian Petersohn: Yes, yeah.

Hana Berger-Moran: From the past, nobody survived. So I have my family. I am so lucky.

And she was about to get even luckier.

Eva Clarke: I had found out that it was the 11th Armored Division that had liberated Mauthausen.

Eva, whose mother had raised her in the U.K., reached out to the liberators a few years after Hana had, sending a picture of her mother and three generations of descendants. The photo appeared on the cover of the division’s next newsletter.

Eva Clarke: I opened this magazine and I said to my mother, “You’re not going to believe this.” There was Hana’s story.

Lesley Stahl: Another baby.

Eva Clarke: Another baby. Up to that point, my mother had always thought that we were the only ones.

Lesley Stahl: So she had no idea–

Eva Clarke: No.

Lesley Stahl: — About these other two?

Eva Clarke: No idea.

The two “babies” spoke and made plans to meet just after their 65th birthdays, at the Mauthausen camp, now a preserved memorial, where the anniversary of liberation would be celebrated. and that’s where baby no. 3 comes in. That same spring, Mark’s son Charlie was struggling to find a 65th birthday present for his dad.

Charlie Olsky: He’s very hard to shop for. So I thought, “Maybe I’ll do some research. See if I can find somebody who has a story. It musta been really miraculous to have a baby in a concentration camp.”

A Google search brought him to the website of the 11th Armored Division, where he saw Eva’s family photo, and story. 

Charlie Olsky: And I looked at the story and it was everything I’d ever heard from my grandmother. Everything matched up. It was the labor camp in Freiberg, that the mother hid the pregnancy, that they had run out of gas. The dates, everything lined up. And I couldn’t believe it.

The website’s administrator connected him to Eva and Hana within an hour.

Charlie Olsky: Hana was in San Francisco and wrote me back immediately–

Lesley Stahl: Oh my gosh.

Charlie Olsky: –and said, “This is incredible. We’re meeting for the first time in two weeks at the camp, so it’s too bad you’re just finding us now.” And I thought, “Too bad nothing. This is great.”

Lesley Stahl: “We’re coming.”

Mark Olsky: First thing he said– first thing out of his mouth that I heard was– “Would you like to go to Austria with me around the time of your birthday?” My mind is, “One of my kids wants to spend a buncha time with me? Sure. Yeah, why n– I’m there.” 

And that’s how the three babies met for the first time in May 2010.

Eva Clarke: We spent the whole of the Saturday in one café talking, laughing, and crying, and talking about our mothers, and comparing and contrasting their three stories. 

Hana Berger-Moran: “Does your mother do this? Does your mother do that?” 

Eva Clarke: And we were all incredulous, absolutely incredulous.

Mark Olsky: It was like we’ve known each other all this time, and we just had to get caught up on what happened for the last 65 years.

Lesley Stahl: Hell of a birthday present.

Mark Olsky: It was the best birthday present I ever got. 

Charlie Olsky: The next year I was like, “I am just getting you a gift certificate.”

That year, at age 65, they marched in the annual commemoration at Mauthausen. This past year, at 80, they marched again, at the special 80th anniversary celebration, where thousands came from all over the world to remember the prisoners who worked and died here, and their liberators. Brian Petersohn made the trip to honor his father.

While the son of the U.S. sergeant who led his soldiers into the camp played taps. And while the babies were far too young to have their own memories, they told us, inside one of the still-standing barracks, that they couldn’t help but sense the presence of their mothers.

Lesley Stahl: What are you feeling in this place? Do you carry her emotions with you?

Hana Berger-Moran: All I am thinking about is, I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before. I have been here before. But I left.

At all the 80th anniversary commemorations, like this concert in Vienna, the three babies were celebrated guests of honor — quite the journey from how their lives began.

Lesley Stahl: How would you describe this relationship? 

Eva Clarke: It’s one of siblings.

Hana Berger-Moran: That’s right.

Eva Clarke: And I’m very glad to have siblings.

Mark Olsky: We found each other. We– we shoulda been together from day one.

Lesley Stahl: You certainly, and your mothers absolutely, were marked for death. You were supposed to be annihilated.

Eva Clarke: My mother occasionally would say– “And in the end, we won.”

Lesley Stahl: Because you all survived.

Eva Clarke: And we have families.

Lesley Stahl: How many grandchildren?

Eva Clarke: I have four.

Hana Berger-Moran: I have two.

Mark Olsky: I have five grandchildren.

And their mothers lived to be 96, 90, and 84.

Lesley Stahl: The lines go on.

Hana Berger-Moran: Life goes on.

Hana Berger-Moran: Let’s live.

Mark Olsky: Lord be praised.

Eva Clarke: L’chaim. 

Hana Berger-Moran: To our life, and to our mothers–

Eva Clarke: To our mothers–

Hana Berger-Moran: Our strong mothers.

Eva Clarke: Yes.

Produced by Shari Finkelstein. Associate producer, Collette Richards. Broadcast associate, Aria Een. Edited by April Wilson. 

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