To commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, Year 10 and 11 IGCSE History students were lucky enough to participate in a webinar with Eva Clarke BEM. Eva is a Holocaust survivor born at the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp on 29th April 1945, and was one of only three babies to survive Mauthausen.
Written by Year 10 students Keira and Isobel:
The talk gave us an insight into what conditions in concentration camps were really like and how much resilience people like Anka, Eva’s mother, had. It also gave us a deeper understanding as to what it was really like for many people living in those times and how difficult it was to survive the extreme conditions which Anka described as “sheer hell on earth”.
During the webinar, Eva talked about her father escaping Nazi Germany and moving to Prague where he met Eva’s mother, only to come under Nazi rule once more in 1939. During World War Two they experienced life in a ghetto and then ended up in Auschwitz. Sadly, even though Anka chose to go in order to stay with her husband, upon arrival she never saw him again. Anka described Auschwitz as that place of “unimaginable horrors”, and it is extraordinary that she managed to survive. After WW2, Anka moved to Cardiff and lived until the age of 96 – a truly remarkable woman.
This was an experience and story that we are all grateful to have heard and has inspired us all to educate ourselves more on this topic. We will definitely keep it in our minds as we continue to learn about Germany in the 1940s.
A huge thank you to Eva Clarke BEM and to the Holocaust Educational Trust for this important opportunity.
