Geboren im KZ

With a foreword by Max Mannheimer. When the Americans liberated the Dachau camp on April 29, 1945, they were surprised to find seven women with babies. A miracle is witnessed amidst the destruction. The book by Eva Gruberová and Helmut Zeller tells the incredible story of Eva and Miriam, two of these seven Jewish mothers who survived various concentration camps through many fortunate coincidences and now live in Canada and Slovakia. The book begins in the early 1940s, when the two young women in Hungary are hopefully planning their lives and falling in love. Both are deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the first weeks of their pregnancies. Unbeknownst to each other, Eva and Miriam go through two more concentration camps until their pregnancies are discovered by the SS at the end of November 1944. They are taken to the Kaufering I subcamp of Dachau, where they meet. The news of the births in the winter of 1944/45 elicits strong emotional reactions in the camp, where people die daily from hunger, cold, and torture. No one knows why the SS does not allow the women and babies to be killed. During the evacuation of the camp, the women, with their babies in their arms, survive an Allied air raid and are eventually liberated in Dachau. Eva learns that her husband Géza did not survive. Miriam is luckier; she emigrates to Canada with her husband and baby. But all seven mothers reunite after the war.