A German Christian was so touched by the story of Holocaust survivor Eva Clarke recently featured here that she has written her a letter of thanks for me to post on.
Ilse Ranetbauer, who shares a birthday with Eva but is a year younger, read the account in the German translation of Israel Today. The only problem is that I don’t have Eva’s address.
I originally picked up the story from Britain’s Daily Express, with Eva’s photo and story flagged up on their front page to mark international Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27, 2026.
I’ve not yet had a reply from the paper to enable me to pass on Ilse’s precious letter, but if anyone can help, I’d be glad to hear from them and will not compromise Eva’s safety by advertising her precise whereabouts. Ilse meanwhile managed to track me down to my Yorkshire home.
Eva, now 81, is among the youngest Holocaust survivors and received a British Empire Medal in 2019 for her work of educating the public on this dark history. She weighed just 3lb when her skeletal mother gave birth to her on a coal cart at the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp just days before it was liberated.
Fifteen members of her family were slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau including her architect father – shot just a week before it was liberated. But Eva’s survival was miraculous. When her Czech-Jewish mother Anka initially arrived at Auschwitz, she was met by ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele, demanding to know if she was pregnant. Had she admitted it, she would have been sent to the gas chamber.
She was thus deemed fit for work elsewhere, eventually arriving at Mauthausen in Austria. She was so shocked to see the name of the death camp that she went into labour. And Eva was born just a day after the Nazis ran out of gas to run their killing machine and just days before US troops liberated the site.
Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; To the Jew First, A Nation Reborn, and King of the Jews, all available from Christian Publications International.
