Eva Clarke, Hana Berger-Moran, and Mark Olsky are survivors born to survivors. During the Holocaust, their mothers were young Jewish women sent to concentration camps when they were newly pregnant.
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Eva Clarke, Hana Berger-Moran, and Mark Olsky are survivors born to survivors. During the Holocaust, their mothers were young Jewish women sent to concentration camps when they were newly pregnant. Holocaust's youngest survivors born to Jewish women who hid pregnancies. Stay informed with the latest developments and expert analysis on this important story.
Eva Clarke, Hana Berger-Moran, and Mark Olsky are survivors born to survivors. During the Holocaust, their mothers were young Jewish women sent to concentration camps when they were newly pregnant.
60 Minutes - Newsmakers The Holocaust's youngest survivors: born in a labor camp, on a death train, and in a concentration camp By Lesley Stahl, Lesley Stahl Correspondent, 60 Minutes One of America's most recognized and experienced broadcast journalists, Lesley Stahl has been a "60 Minutes" correspondent since 1991. Read Full Bio Lesley Stahl, Shari Finkelstein Shari Finkelstein Shari Finkelstein has been a producer at 60 Minutes since 1998, working with correspondent Lesley Stahl. She loves not having a fixed beat and reporting on great stories of all kinds. She began her career at ABC News. Read Full Bio Shari Finkelstein February 15, 2026 / 7:00 PM EST / CBS News Add CBS News on Google Last spring marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and the liberation of the last remaining Nazi concentration camps. It might feel, nearly a century later, as though there are few Holocaust survival stories left to tell. But then we found this one.It begins with three young women who were married and newly pregnant in 1944 when they were sent to the notorious death camp Auschwitz, then assigned to work as slave laborers in Germany. With pregnancy an offense punishable by death in the camps, the story of how these three women managed to deceive their Nazi captors and give birth to three tiny babies -- who are now 80 years old -- involves narrow misses, seemingly impossible twists of fate and luck, unimaginable suffering, and miracles.Lesley Stahl: Everyone keeps calling you the babies.Mark Olsky: Yes.Lesley Stahl: And you're 80.Mark Olsky: Yes.Lesley Stahl: Are you okay with that– Mark Olsky: Oh yes.Hana Berger-Moran: Oh yeah.Eva Clarke: Absolutely. We're proud of it.Hana Berger-Moran: Totally. Eva Clarke, Hana Berger-Moran, and Mark Olsky are among – if not the – youngest survivors of the Holocaust.Hana Berger-Moran: April 12th.Mark Olsky: April 20.Eva Clarke: April 29th. Eva Clarke, Hana Berger-Moran and Mark Olsky 60 Minutes Born in April 1945, just before Germany's surrender in May. At the time, they were Nazi prisoners, but their story begins long before that, when Eva's mother Anka, from Czechoslovakia; Mark's mother Rachel, from Poland; and Hana's mother Priska, also from Czechoslovakia, were young Jewish women in a world that was about to be shattered.Hana Berger-Moran: My dear late mother grew up in a small town. And her parents were owners of a little café, little Jewish café.Mark Olsky: She had eight siblings. Mark's mother was from a textile manufacturing town; Eva's from east of Prague.Eva Clarke: She was a champion swimmer, junior backstroke swimming champion of Czechoslovakia.Lesley Stahl: For the whole country?Eva Clarke: For the whole country, yeah.Lesley Stahl: Wow.And they each fell in love with their husbands as Europe was descending into war.Hana Berger-Moran: My late father was a journalist. Lesley Stahl: How did they meet?Eva Clarke:They met, I believe, in a nightclub–Lesley Stahl: Oh.Eva Clarke: --across a crowded room.Mark Olsky: She avoided going into details. She talked about things..Mark's mother never told him much about his father, but she did speak of him to Mark's son, her grandson Charlie.Charlie Olsky: She told me that I looked like him. And I said, "Really?" And she said, "But that's it. He was so elegant. You're nothing like him." Lesley Stahl: And you're not.Charlie Olsky: Um.. But soon after the newly married couple moved into their first apartment in Warsaw, German soldiers came one morning and seized it.Charlie Olsky: She was still in her nightgown. She said she still had her toothbrush. And she was just sent into the streets.Hana Berger-Moran: They took my grandparents in 1942, my-- my aunt in 1943.As the Nazis occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia, Jews were rounded up in Ghettos and sent to camps. Mark's parents spent much of the war in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. Eva's were sent to a Czech camp called Terezin, where she was conceived, in violation of camp rules.Eva Clarke: To become pregnant in a concentration camp was considered a crime by the Nazis. Lesley Stahl: For a Jewish person to get pregnant was a crime?Eva Clarke: A crime, because, you know, they were trying to murder-- they were trying to annihilate every member of the Jewish people.By mid-to-late 1944, the killings had accelerated. Remaining ghettos were liquidated, and all three women, newly pregnant, were loaded from different cities onto packed freight cars headed for Auschwitz, Hana's mother alongside her husband. Hana Berger-Moran 60 Minutes Hana Berger-Moran: They were sitting in the train on the floor. And my mother is saying, "If it's a girl, it's going to be Hana. If it's a boy, it will be Michael."Lesley Stahl: This is on the train to Auschwitz–Hana Berger-Moran: On the train to Auschwitz.Lesley Stahl: Did they know anything about Auschwitz? Hana Berger-Moran: Oh, they did. They already knew those were death camps.The arrival platform at th
