Born Survivors

“An astonishing and deeply moving work.”—Booklist (starred review)

“An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.”—Kirkus Reviews

Among the millions of Holocaust victims sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944, Priska, Rachel, and Anka each pass through the concentration camp’s infamous gates with a secret. Separated from their husbands and strangers to one another, they are pregnant and scared. After losing so many other loved ones to the Nazis, these women are determined to hold on to all they have left: their lives and those of their unborn babies.

Born Survivors follows them as, against all the odds, they give birth to their babies and go on to build new lives with their children after World War II. Theirs are stories of hardships and miracles as they narrowly escape the clutches of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz; conceal their condition after they are sent to a Nazi slave-labor camp, where they are half-starved and almost worked to death; and as the Allies close in, survive a seventeen-day train journey to Mauthausen in Austria. By the time they arrive, all three babies have been born—but because the camp has run out of Zyklon B, their lives and those of their mothers are saved. Sixty-five years later, the three “miracle babies” share a remarkable, inspirational story of three mothers who defied death at the hands of the Nazis to give their children life.