Shownotes Transcript
Going up. Prices keep going up these days. It feels like being on an elevator that only goes up. Going up. But not at Metro. We're pushing the down button. Going down. We've lowered prices. Get one line of 5G data for $40, period. That's 20% lower. And you get a free 5G phone when you bring your number. Only at Metro. Five-year guarantee on eligible plans. Exclusions apply. See website for details. Not available if at Metro or T-Mobile in the past six months. Tax supplies. ♪
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the U.S. Fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a U.S.-based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Saul David. Just over 80 years ago, on the 5th of May 1945, a reconnaissance squad from the 11th US Armoured Division, known as the Thunderbolts, led by Sergeant Albert Kosciak, entered Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria, to find a scene of unimaginable horror.
Thousands of sorcery prisoners, many of them catatonic and on the verge of collapse. A huge number were naked, their skin covered in sores or eaten away by disease. Elsewhere, they found piles of corpses, some freshly killed.
In spite of their appalling physical condition, some of the prisoners were rioting and even more went wild with joy at the sight of their liberators. Their joy soon turned to anger as they turned on their former tormentors, Austrian and German guards, killing several with their bare hands. In all, Kosciak and his men liberated 40,000 prisoners at Mauthausen and a neighbouring sub-camp, as well as accepting the surrender of 1,800 German prisoners of war.
Incredibly, among the prisoners were three desperately ill young Jewish women, Priska, Rachel and Anka, who had recently given birth. All three mothers and babies would survive. And their extraordinary story, unique in the history of the Holocaust, was first told in 2015, the 70th anniversary of their liberation by former journalist and author Wendy Holden in her book, Born Survivors. And we've got Wendy on the podcast today. Wendy, welcome back.
Thank you very much indeed. Very nice to be here. Now, tell me a bit about these three extraordinary women with iron wills and pretty tough constitutions too, frankly, to survive what they went through. Tell us a little bit about their background, where they came from. And they all came from relatively middle-class backgrounds, didn't they? And tell us a bit about the sort of life they led before the war began. Yes, well, I mean, I'm sure that was a distant memory to them by the time liberation came because they'd all had rather gilded lives in concentration
comfortable Jewish homes, but not observant Jews particularly. They were very much assimilated into their communities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and what is now Slovakia.
And they had everything to live for. They were young. They were beautiful. They were looking to have great lives. Anka was studying at Prague University. She was studying law. She was very beautiful. And she had hopes to become a lawyer. Priska wanted to be in Slovakia. She wanted to be a professor of languages. And Rachel, who came from a very wealthy mill-owning family, had one intention, which was to marry a wealthy mill-owner.
and to live a very nice life as a lady of leisure. But she also planned on doing charitable work. And of course, all that changed when the Nazis came to power and invaded their countries and initially herded them into ghettos and then sent them to Auschwitz and then to slave labor and ultimately to Mauthausen. So everything changed so dramatically for them. And yes, it's true, they had incredible achievements.
and fortitude to have survived all that they did. But they didn't start with that. That's what's so kind of fascinating to me about these stories, that these are ordinary people who somehow managed to survive the unimaginable. And they would all say that they didn't survive due to anything more than luck and that many other pregnant women in that situation
situation didn't make it just because they were unlucky with timing or unlucky with being caught out in some way. Now, you mentioned they all ended up at one stage in Auschwitz. And for many, many people, of course, that was a death sentence. They had the additional disadvantage, I suppose, of being pregnant at that time, or all pregnant by their husbands.
And yet they managed to conceal their pregnancy from, of course, one of the most wicked men in history, Dr. Mengele, who some of the listeners might know later escapes to Argentina, doesn't he? And sort of lives out his life until old age. You know, great shame that was. But they managed to conceal their pregnancy from
from Mengele during the inspection, during the selection, I suppose, as it was known. And we're fortunate. Fortune, of course, always plays into these stories up to a point to be sent to another camp. They might not have felt it at the time in Freiburg in Saxony on the edge of the Ore Mountains, where they're put to work in the armaments industry. Tell us a little bit about Freiburg. I mean, you know, any aspect of the Holocaust is bad. This is a
a peripheral element, I suppose, of the Holocaust. They were there to work chiefly. A lot of people died, of course. They weren't properly fed. Conditions were pretty brutal, weren't they, even at Freiburg? They really were. And can you imagine? There they are. They've been separated from their husbands who they adored. They married for love.
They're all two months pregnant. They were fortunate to have been given slightly baggy clothing from those that had been gassed in Auschwitz and then put on a train. And the only reason they were put on a train and not gassed was because it was 1944 and the Germans had lost so many soldiers to the front that they were replacing them with anybody they could find. And of course, they had this totally expendable workforce in the Jews and the prisoners in the camps, other prisoners in the camps.
So they were sent to Freiburg in Saxony. It's still there. It's now a derelict factory. I've been there with them.
It's a huge, huge place. And they were entrusted to build wings, the wings of a new jet that the Nazis were planning on having built. And certain people who know about these things say that had it been built, they might have turned the war. But of course, it was never built for a number of reasons. Mainly, they left it too late. And secondly, they gave the task of building it to Jewish prisoners who didn't know what they were doing. And if they did, they would sabotage it whenever they could.
These women lived largely on a diet of water, which they had done pretty much throughout their pregnancies. When you think what women these days go through in pregnancy, folic acid and all the right vitamins and so on. I mean, they literally lived on ersatz coffee in the morning, which was really just no more than sort of oily, petrally tasting water. Some bread made maybe out of chestnut flour with weevils in it. And what they jokingly called soup, which was really just more water with
maybe the odd potato peel or onion or something in it.
and then more coffee and a little piece of bread in the evenings. And they were these women who had had very lovely lives and had never really done a day's work in their lives, were expected to work seven days a week, you know, 12 hours a day on shifts in this factory. And a lot of it involved riveting sheets of metal into place with huge, great riveting machines that were so big and so heavy that it took two of them to hold it. No air defenders, massive vibration, incredible noise. And they were weakened both
both by starvation and certainly by their growing bellies and their pregnancies. And of course, because they were being starved, their bellies didn't really show. And they were able to conceal their pregnancies not only from the guards, which was enormously important because those women who were in that group of 1,000 women sent there
who were found to have been pregnant, were, when it was still operational, sent back to Auschwitz to Joseph Mengele, the angel of death, who had inspected them. And if they had escaped his clutches in Auschwitz, he was particularly enraged and he would either
send them to the gas chambers or he would take them to the experimentation wing and do unspeakable experiments on them and their babies. So it was vital that the women didn't let on and in fact one woman was with her two younger sisters and she didn't even tell them she was pregnant. Even though she slept in the same bunk with them, she didn't want to compromise them in
in any way. One of the myths, Wendy, about the Second World War is that ordinary Germans didn't know about the Holocaust. And yet in Freiburg, of course, they had to march through the town, these slave workers in terrible condition. Tell us about the reaction of the townspeople. Was there any kind of attempt to help them at all? In Freiburg, I didn't come across any stories there. But when they were then moved on to Mauthausen, there were some amazing stories. One in particular sticks in my mind. It was a young woman called Anna Ferasa,
And she worked as a cleric, a clerical worker in an office opposite the station. And I don't know if any of your listeners have been to Mauthausen, but it's in probably the most picturesque setting of any Nazi concentration camp. It's absolutely beautiful town. It's set on the banks of the River Danube with a steep hill going up to the fortress quarry at the top, which was the one that was turned into a concentration camp. But it's all timbered buildings and geraniums and window boxes. I mean, it's like a chocolate box.
image. And this woman worked opposite the station and every single day that the trains arrived from various ghettos and camps around Nazi-occupied Europe, these people would be disgorged and she didn't know if they were men or women, you couldn't tell. They all had shaven heads, they were all incredibly thin, many of them wearing striped uniforms, filthy, lice-ridden, marched up through the town. They were desperately thirsty, desperately hungry. Some of them ran towards the town's fountain and were
kicked and had stones thrown at them to keep them away for fear of infecting the water supply. And they were marched up to the top of the hill, which was a granite quarry, the granite from which Vienna was built actually, and made to do unspeakable things and basically work to death. That was the idea. If they weren't worked to death, they were tortured and beaten. I think they said there were 60 different methods of murder in Mauthausen. And it was a place where the SS sent their young officers to learn how to be cruel
But this one woman, she saw these people marching up the hill every day and she was horrified by what she saw and she knew that none of them ever came back out of that camp. And so she decided to make a little hole in her pocket and walk the route that she knew the prisoners would be taking whenever the next train came in. And she would drop things like maybe a needle and thread
or a pen and paper or a morsel of bread or something, anything that would give them some sort of hope or sign of compassion. And the sad part for her was that she got caught. And even though she was a good Catholic house frow, she got sent to Ravensbrück camp where rather beautifully, although she got typhus and nearly died, she was saved by a Jewish doctor. But when you hear that story and when you really imagine what it must have been like for her friends and neighbours,
to have known that this one person that they were aware of had done something humane towards these prisoners who they were told were enemies of the Reich who wanted to have them all murdered in their beds and had no love for them. And that was the consequences for her and for her family. You can see why people would be too afraid to do something.
Before we get to Mauthausen and just on the cusp of the evacuation of Freiburg, as of course, the Russians were coming in from the east and the Americans were coming in from the west. And they're really attempting to move what remains of the prisoners of the Reich into the kind of what was known as the southern redoubt. You see that Eisenhower has got absolute preoccupation that the Germans are going to keep fighting on from this.
alpine stronghold. But in any case, some people clearly within the German Empire were considering that they might need some slave labor down there. So they're moving a lot of the survivors. But before that happens, or almost at the exact same time, Prisca is denounced, didn't she, by one of her fellow prisoners. And
maybe partly as a result of that, but certainly just after that, she goes into labor and has a child. And I, you know, as I was reading that, I was thinking to myself, how on earth is she and this baby going to survive now that, of course, it's clear that she is pregnant? So tell us what happened. Well,
Well, incredibly. I think for the mothers, it must have been the worst moment was when they went into labour because up until then, they've been able to keep their baby secret and safe inside them, hidden by baggy clothing. By the way, the same clothing they'd been given in Auschwitz seven months before, they wore the same clothes. These women couldn't bear their own smell. They had no decent washing facilities. It was a horrible situation to be in. And she started to go into labour and she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it.
And incidentally, she had lost three babies before she gave birth to Hannah, which was even more poignant for her because this child was so wanted. But she went into labour and incredibly, the guards, perhaps because of the timing and they knew that things were potentially changing in the war, the course of the war, and that they might end up being imprisoned or criticised for their treatment of prisoners. Some of these women guards actually did report
take care of her a little bit. They gave her a plank to lie on. She gave birth on the plank, watched by the guards who were taking bets on whether it was a boy or a girl. And little Hannah came out. She weighed less than three pounds. Prisca at that point was around 70 pounds. Nobody knows for sure, but that was roughly what she would have weighed.
And incredibly, she had a little milk and she gave it to her baby and tucked her baby inside that filthy dress. And that was all she had to do. But very sweetly, the other women who worked for her managed to get little scraps of fabric. It was a kind of soft cloth that was used to polish some of the rags.
riveted areas on these wings and they made a little kind of coat dress and a bonnet for the baby, which was just the sweetest thing because it was such a gift in a place like that. And the only reason Hannah and Prisca weren't dispatched back to Auschwitz by then was because it was April 12th, 1945 and Auschwitz had of course been
liberated by then. So instead, the baby wasn't killed, the baby wasn't taken from her. Instead, they were put on a train the next day to be sent to Buchenwald and the plan was to have them gassed at Buchenwald. But of course, Buchenwald was then liberated and their one or two day train journey
I think by then there were something like 900 women and the train was actually coupled onto other trains of other prisoners. So in the end, there were 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners heading south. They kept going on. So this one to two day train journey without food or water actually lasted 17 days before they got to one of the last remaining camps open that could take and kill that many people.
Okay, we'll take a break there. Do join us in a moment when we'll hear the extraordinarily courageous story of Czech station master Antonin Pavlicek. I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist. And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And together we're the hosts of The Rest is Classified, where we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. This week, we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden and how he orchestrated the
biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American and British history. Snowden revealed that the American government was mass collecting data on its own citizens, and it was really the first time that Americans and so many others around the world understood the extent of the U.S. government's mass surveillance. That's right, it's a story I covered at the time, and it so really gets to wider questions about what
Welcome back.
It's during this train journey, and it's absolutely horrific detail you include in all of this, Wendy. I mean, it's necessary to read it, I know. It's incredibly moving, and there are little shafts of light here and there. You've already talked about the clothes being made. But during the train journey, there was an amazing act of courage by a station master, a Czech station master called Antonin Pavlicek.
they stop at his town along the way and he's absolutely insistent that they're going to be fed. He wants them to stay there. I mean, you do get these moments, don't you, which relieve some of the horror in the book. Absolutely. The humanity and the inhumanity is what I always look for in my books. And that's certainly the case with Antonin Pavlicek, who is
our hero. I'm now named an honorary sibling to the three babies who are all still with us at 80. And we've got this joke that, you know, we want Tom Hanks to play Antonin Pavlicek in the movie of the book. It would be perfect for him, this lovely sort of
avuncular, white-haired gentleman who stands up to the SS commandant who says he doesn't know what it is. They have been largely untouched by the Holocaust. They've been bombed and they've seen planes overhead, but where they are in their little town called Hornibrija in the middle of Czechoslovakia, apart from the fact that they had to work hard and this Kaolin factory continued to work for the Nazis, they didn't really have anything else.
but he was told that a train was on its way through and that it was coming there because the tracks at Pilsen had been bombed by the Allies and it would have to stop there for a day or two and
He made all the arrangements to receive this train. He didn't know what the cargo was. He was told it had a cargo. In fact, the Germans use the expression Stücke, which means pieces. And that's their expression for human beings in their care and in their trust, so to speak. And of course, the train starts pulling into the station and he can smell it actually before it arrives. And the doors were thrown open and 36 bodies were thrown off like so much garbage.
and thrown into the woods, and he was absolutely horrified. He had no idea what this was. He couldn't believe what he was seeing, and his immediate reaction was to go and summon the local police officer and tell him that there were bodies on the train and they were being thrown off into the woods and they needed to do something about it, not really understanding the risk he was taking, I think, and what he was doing. And, of course, the police officer and Mr. Padlicek were completely dismissed by the SS commandant who several times pulled out his pistol and threatened to shoot him.
But Mr. Pavlicek persisted and he decided that he was going to rally the townspeople
He was going to get them all to come into this big factory kitchen and make soup and bread. And he was going to feed the prisoners as many as he could. And the commandant told him it was not worth even doing. These people are worthless. They're not even things. They're just nothing. They are nobody. Nothing to nobody was the expression. And Mr. Pavlicek thought about this and he said, well, how about if I feed you and your men and your female guards first? And by the way, we have cider and we have cheese and we have bread and we have ham. And of course the commandant
Guards themselves had been deprived for some time as well. So eventually the Commandant agreed, doing this deal with Mr. Pavlicek. And because of Mr. Pavlicek, at that point, there's Friska, who's got baby Hannah, who was born on the 12th. On the 20th, Mark Olski was born to his mother, Rachel, again,
three pound baby to a 70 pound mother born in an open coal wagon in the middle of a deluge. She didn't even have anything to cut the umbilical cord with and thought she was going to have to bite through it. But somebody found a rusty razor and when she was able to hit the razor blade, she was able to cut through it.
Her sisters for the first time realised she was even pregnant and took one look at her and this tiny creature that was in her arms and just thought they were all going to die. But they all received something thanks to Mr. Pavlicek. Anka at the far end who was nine months pregnant and looked like a walking living skeleton, pregnant skeleton is how she described herself.
She received a glass of milk and the others received soup and they received bread. And very sweetly, the townspeople of Hornibruzza put tiny little notes inside the bread in multiple languages because they knew these prisons were different nationalities. And these little notes said, hold on, keep going, the war's almost over. And for them, that was for some of them who'd been under occupation or imprisoned by the Nazis since 1939. This was 1945. That was the first massacre
moment in all those years that somebody had been compassionate and shown humanity towards them. You mentioned the birth of Mark. That took place rather inauspiciously. Hitler's 56th birthday. It's going to be his last birthday. So I suppose there's something to be said for it. Also the birthday of my younger sister Tess, just so it happens. That's the second of the babies born. And the third is born actually as they arrive at Mauthausen.
isn't she so this is anchor giving birth originally thought to be they get the sex wrong don't they there's a bit of confusion over that final birth but again this is this is moment of extreme danger isn't it when you know finally the the cloak as it were is thrown off and it's quite clear that this little baby's been born plus they're in math house and they don't quite know how the guards they're going to react so tell us what happens next this is on the 29th of april the day before hitler's death
Yes. Well, Anka had heard of Mauthausen. None of the mothers had ever heard of Auschwitz when they were sent to Auschwitz, but they had all heard of Mauthausen. Word had got out that it was one of the most brutal camps. And when the train, the 17-day train of snaking train of death finally arrived at this station and the doors opened and they saw the name Mauthausen, that's what provoked Anka to go into labour.
And almost all of the prisoners were forced to climb up the hill, as I said earlier. But she was too weak and several were either dying or dead. So they were put on a wooden cart and hauled up through the town by human prisoners, you know, who were human horses, really, who were used to pull up this cart. And she can remember looking back down
the valley down to the Danube, which was the setting sun was going over it. It was April. There were blossoms in the trees. She had never seen anything more beautiful. And she remembered thinking, when I die now with my baby, this will be the most beautiful thing and the last thing I will ever see.
And when she got to the gates of the camp, she gave birth and her baby came out silent still. And there was a prisoner doctor there and he slapped the child and it cried out. And then she was given the baby in her arms. And unusually, unlike the other prisoners who were taken up and into the barracks and had a horrible time with the guards up there.
She was actually taken to the infirmary and she was given a bed of sorts. I think there was a little bit of straw and newspaper and she was left alone with her child. And again, all three mothers somehow, despite being so severely malnourished, they all had some breast milk.
And apparently I spoke, I interviewed a midwife about that. And apparently that is common, that does happen, but it does suck the calcium from the women terribly. And several of them went white very early on and lost their teeth and so on because of that.
The bulk of the SS guards leave on the 3rd of May with the Commandant leaving the Germans and Austrians or some of the German soldiers and Austrian firefighters, I think they were, you mentioned in your book, Wendy, in control. And then, of course, we get the events of the 5th of May.
of May, which we've already spoken about at the top of this, which is the liberation of the camp. But clearly the women and their babies are in a pretty bad way at this stage. So their troubles, even at liberation, are far from over, aren't they? I mean, tell us about the efforts that are made to save the babies and the women. Yes, absolutely. Well, they always say the babies, there were three reasons they survived. One was that they arrived in the camp on April 29th and the gas ran out on April 28th.
The second was that Hitler killed himself on April 30th, and the third was the liberation. And as you said, they were in a shocking state. I mean, Rachel with baby Mark can remember lying down on the floor and somebody, some kind of prisoner came and gave her a piece of bread, which she just held in her hands and looked at it. She was too weak to even eat it, but she clasped her hands around it and then she lost consciousness. When she came to, somebody else, another prisoner was prizing open her fingers to take the bread.
and she couldn't even resist. She couldn't fight. I think if they'd been left even another day or two, they probably wouldn't have made it. At least two of them wouldn't have made it. They were in such a terrible state. And of course, they didn't know what was going to happen. They were put in, just dumped in barracks. The Germans apparently had all sorts of plans for mass extermination. At one point, they were going to take them all down to the
the Danube on barges and then scupper the barges and drown them all. They were trying to eradicate the evidence basically of the horrific things they had done there, but their predominant priority was to flee and to get away from the approaching allied soldiers.
So when they did arrive, these American soldiers, the 11th Armoured Division, and actually one thing I discovered after I'd written the book was that this young Sergeant Kosciak defied orders to be there. He was actually on a reconnaissance mission and he defied orders to be there because he felt he had to go up and try and save these people. And he was an absolute hero. And of course...
The American soldiers that came in were so horrified by what they saw. Naked men and women, people who hadn't been wearing clothes for years because they'd had been stripped from them or fallen off them or stolen from them. Some of them weighing 40 pounds. Several of them died, literally dead.
clapping and saying, thank you, thank you for coming and then died. That was the last thing that they did before they died. And the American soldiers were so horrified. The natural human instinct is to give them anything they've got, cigarettes, Hershey bars, anything, just to feed these poor, hungry, starving people.
But what they didn't realize then, and advice didn't come in until a bit later, was that they should only feed them incrementally because the bodies that have been deprived of food for a very long period of time simply can't tolerate it. And it just immediately becomes liquid and they basically die from diarrhea. And unfortunately, I think something like 1,800 of them died in those first few days from eating.
And there was terrible chaos. As you said, the prisoners that were healthy enough and strong enough were beating guards to death. The women who'd been forced into prostitution, two of them threw themselves on the electric fences because they knew that the retribution would be so bad that they wanted to kill themselves rather than face it.
And these women were, the three mothers were with their tiny, tiny babies that were so sickly and so poorly, really didn't know what to do. And one of the most poignant stories for me was when an American soldier handed Rachel a Hershey bar and she hadn't seen chocolate, she thought, in about four or five years. And she just held it in her hand and looked at it and then she smelt it. And he thought she didn't know what chocolate was.
And so he sort of mimicked peeling it open and eating it and showed her and she started to cry. And he asked her why she was crying. And she said, because you think I don't know what chocolate is. And he said, have you looked in the mirror lately? And he said, we thought you were all just animals from the way you look. We didn't realize. And he was hugely apologetic.
But can you imagine what that was like? And then the funny little story about when all the rest of the army came in, the American army. I mean, these women had dreamed about meeting GIs their whole lives and they started pinching their cheeks and sort of rubbing their lips and trying to make themselves a little more presentable to these handsome American soldiers who'd come in and save them. And they were all completely smitten by them and wanted to look their best for them. I mean, it was an incredible thing. But of course, the war wasn't over for them because
even on liberation they were terribly unwell they were
ill, they were weak. They didn't know that all three husbands had died. They didn't know that most of their families had perished. They didn't know that their apartments had been ransacked and everything had been stolen and they had nothing to go back to. And in certain countries, they weren't even aware that the Jews that did return, many of them were murdered because people had taken their homes and belongings and they didn't want them back on the scene. I mean, one of the tragedies of the story, as you've just been outlining then, Wendy, is even if you survive the Holocaust, what
what happens next? Is there an opportunity for you to return home? In many, many cases, of course, there was not. In the case of your three women, some of them do try and go home, don't they? They don't find a particularly receptive environment from other people in the town. It may be extraordinary to say that, but that was the case. And all of them end up emigrating, don't they? Two to America and one to the UK, I think.
Which kind of brings us to your involvement in the story, Wendy. I mean, one of the ladies had written something about what had happened to her, but certainly the connection between all three of them surviving with babies was not known, was it? No, exactly. I came across Eva to begin with and her and her mother's story by looking online after reading an obituary about a woman in Canada who died and her baby had been taken away from her in Auschwitz and drowned.
And I just wondered if any babies had survived the Holocaust. And Eva and her mother's story came up. And if she lived in Australia at that point, I would have gotten a plane to meet her because I was so fascinated by her story. And I realized it was an untold story. Incredibly, 70 years on at that point from the Holocaust, there'd never been a book written about babies surviving in the Holocaust.
So I then discovered she lived in Cambridge and I live in Suffolk, so an hour and a half away. And I spent the day with her, a very emotional day. Her mother, sadly, had died just six months prior at the age of 97. And after the long day with her, hearing her mother's story, I asked if she would do me the great honor of letting me write her story. And she reached out and touched my arm and said, I've been waiting for you for 70 years.
And it was so intensely moving that we both cried. And then I told her I believed that she was the only one. I couldn't find another baby who had survived. And she said, a little indignantly, that I thought I was the only one too. But five years previously, she'd encountered two others. And they just happened to all be going back to Mauthausen for the 65th anniversary of the liberation. And it was the last time that the American liberators were going because they were dwindling in number or were too unwell to travel.
And they all managed to meet there and they discovered their mothers had been on exactly the same journey from Auschwitz all the way through slave labor in Freiburg, on the train and all the way through to liberation in Mauthausen. And none of them had ever known about the other women being pregnant. And it wouldn't have been able to do anything about it anyway, really. But I like to think that had they known, it would have been a little bit of a comfort for each other, at least.
And Wendy, we are, of course, just a few days away from the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen. Will all three children be attending?
Yes, I've been invited along with all three of them by the Austrian government as we were in 2015. It's a splendid event. I mean, they really make it an extraordinary weekend of celebrations, really. They have a festival of joy in Vienna to start with. And then we all go to the camp and there's a very solemn commemorations with music and prayer and
And then we're being hosted both by the American embassy and the British embassy. And I believe that the president of Austria is going to present the babies with a birthday cake. Wow. Wow. Amazing story. And I've just got a quick admission to make. I don't think I've said this in public before, that during my honeymoon, which was in
1995. So that would have been the 50th anniversary of the liberation. It was actually August. So a few months later, I was traveling through Central Europe with my wife and we decided to stop off and see a few historical sites because we were staying in Linz, which is incredibly beautiful town. We went to see Mauthausen. So later on in that honeymoon, by the way, we also had a look at Auschwitz. And you may say I know how to show my wife a good time.
Or you may say she's long-suffering. She's still with us, the question. LAUGHTER
She is incredibly. But anyway, moving on from Mauthausen, I mean, it's an amazing story, Wendy. You know, I know it's been one of your best-selling books, and I'm not surprised. And it really does deserve to be made into a film. So please tell me there's some discussion about that going on at the moment. Oh, we're trying. We're definitely trying. And, you know, as I said, I've even written to Tom Hanks to tell him that we all want him to be Mr. Pavlicek, but I didn't get a reply. Yeah.
Before I leave, just tell us a little bit about your current project. It's interrelated, I suppose, in some ways. And this time it's a novel, though, isn't it, Wendy, The Teacher of Auschwitz? Tell us about that. I wrote a book called 100 Miracles with another survivor, Susanna Ruzickova, who had been in Auschwitz, first of all, the terrorism ghetto in Czechoslovakia, and then in Auschwitz, and then ultimately in Bergen-Belsen. And she was liberated in Bergen-Belsen, and her story was equally moving. She was only a teenager, and she and her mother survived, but nobody else survived.
in her family. And although it was very harrowing working with her, there was one occasion where her entire being lit up with joy. And it was when she told me about this young German gay man, Freddy Hirsch, who she had first met in Terezin, who was head of the youth leader. He was keeping all the children happy and separate from the barracks and being educated and playing games and doing art and trying to keep their spirits up.
And then he did exactly the same thing when he went to Auschwitz-Birkenau to the Czech family camp. Incredibly, he persuaded Mengele, who was in charge there, that he should be allowed to have a separate children's block. And he had the walls painted with Disney cartoons and he had teachers come in and teach them songs and poetry and history. And they put on little shows, which the SS actually turned up
to see and sat in the front row crying, moist-eyed with memory, presumably thinking of their own families and children back home, before then returning to the railway ramp to dispatch another several thousand of them to the gas chambers. An extraordinary story and a
I planned on writing it as a non-fiction, straightforward biography, but there just simply wasn't enough archive material because Freddie was ignored and denigrated for 80 years after the war for being homosexual. The communists in Czechoslovakia and Poland did this. And also for being what they call
they called a collaborator just because he negotiated with the SS for privileges for the children. So I decided to turn it into a novel. And it was published in UK in January. It's been published in the US in June, and it'll be published in 18 other countries this year. And it's another amazing and unique story. I was just incredibly lucky to come across another story that hadn't been written about.
all these years after the Holocaust. And these are stories, especially now, the way the world is, that need to be told and retold. They're timeless and we must remember the lessons of history. Yeah, very timely. And it also reminds me that the well-known story and, of course, later film Schindler's List started out as a novel, didn't it? For very similar reasons, actually, told by Thomas Keneally. Yes, absolutely. And yes, these are stories that
they just seem to resonate enormously with people. And I'm so glad that they still resonate enormously with people. And I'm glad that they make people cry. I'm glad that they're moving. I cry when I write them sometimes, but all of my stories are redemptive. All the books I write have some sort of redemptive impact.
if not necessarily happy ending, there's something that comes out of it. You know, when I started writing Born Survivors, I knew that the three babies had survived. I knew they'd gone on to have marriages and children and grandchildren and that the legacy continued. And I knew that we were going to be memorializing these incredible young women, their mothers,
who survived against all the odds. And that's such a privilege, such an honour. When I wrote Susanna's book, She Died Before It Was Published, I left her on the Friday and she died on the Tuesday. But an incredible honour to have told her story and to have told Freddie's, which was her dying wish that Freddie's story be told. And I dedicate The Teacher of Auschwitz to Susanna.
And finally, Wendy, he couldn't be here today, but my co-host Patrick is a former colleague of yours from the Daily Telegraph, isn't he? Tell us about your days as a war correspondent together. Oh,
Well, we were in New York together, actually, for a while as well. And no, Paddy is a fabulous chap. He's a lovable rogue. He was always the life and soul of any party. And yes, I'm very, very fond of Paddy, although we don't see each other very much these days. But no, an incredible thing. I mean, once you've been a reporter and worked alongside people in very often difficult circumstances, that bond never really...
It never really fades. It's always there, even if you don't pick it up for a few years when you meet each other again, like any good old friends, you know. But there is something definitely come. There's a real camaraderie amongst people who've covered wars and who've covered difficult situations, I think. Yeah, well, I'll send him your best, Wendy. He passes his best back to you. Thanks so much for coming on today. It's a really extraordinary story. And we look forward to talking to you again at some point. Thank you very much.
Okay, that's all we have time for. Do join us on Friday for our regular episode of Battleground Ukraine. Goodbye. I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist. And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And together we're the hosts of The Rest is Classified, where we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. This week, we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden, and how he orchestrated the
biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American and British history. Snowden revealed that the American government was mass collecting data on its own citizens and it was really the first time that Americans and so many others around the world understood the extent of the US government's mass surveillance. That's right, it's a story I covered at the time and it
It also really gets to wider questions about what privacy means, how technology has changed our lives and what the government and companies can do with data we might have thought was private. And we'll take you through the whole story from Snowden's early career in the CIA and the NSA to his life in exile in Russia. So to hear more search for The Rest is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.