‘What’s happening is extremely worrying. The only answer is education... to stand up against racism’

EVA Clarke will take the horrors of the Holocaust to the grave.

- BY GILES SHELDRICK Chief Reporter

Her skeletal mother gave birth to her on a coal cart at the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp. She weighed just 3lb.

Fifteen of her family were slaughtered by Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau including her father — shot a week before it was liberated.

Yet, despite the lifelong pain she has carried as a victim and survivor of humanity’s most atrocious act, Eva, now 80, believes that only by standing up to hate and prejudice can we hope to create a better world.

Today she continues to relentlessly preach the values of remembrance and tolerance, in spite of an alarming rise in antisemitism.

She said: “What is happening around the world, and in this country, is extremely worrying. The only answer can be education. To try and educate, especially young people, to stand up against racism and prejudice.

“We only hear the bad news. We don’t tend to praise sufficiently all the wonderful work that has been done and continues to be done by various charitable organisations

“There are so many amazing young people doing their best in very difficult circumstances to try and counter all this prejudice.”

Eva, born to Czech-Jewish mother Anka Bergman and her German-Jewish architect father Bernd Nathan, is one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust. In September 1944 Bernd was transported to Auschwitz — his wife volunteered to follow him but he did not know she was pregnant.

They lost baby son Dan, born in 1944, to pneumonia while held in the Theresienstadt ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic.