Behind Enemy Lines tells Marthe Cohn’s remarkable story of being a Jewish spy who risked her life after losing a sister to Auschwitz and her fiancé to a firing squad. Tomorrow to Be Brave tells the true story of Susan Travers, the only woman in the French Foreign Legion and was published globally. What other books have you written about war? What struck me most about all that I had seen, though, were the great acts of courage and kindness that people were capable of even in the worst possible circumstances, or perhaps because of them. The experience scarred me and I suffered from a mild form of PTSD following my return to England. Then when I became a journalist, for a while I was a war correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph and travelled all over the world covering conflicts. My father fought the Japanese in Burma and my mother’s fiancé was killed aged 19 parachuting into Germany. I grew up in a family that had been deeply affected by war.

Why are you so interested in history and war? I knew then that I had to tell all three stories together in one volume spanning the war in Europe and Hitler’s attempted destruction of the Jews. She told me that until 2010, she believed she was unique too but then discovered two other babies in America and they had since become very close. She reached out, touched my arm, and with tears in her eyes said: “I have been waiting for you for 70 years.” I told her I believe her story to be unique and that I have never found anything written about babies born in the Holocaust before. She lived just over one hour from me in Cambridge, England, and having spent an emotional day with her I asked if she would do me the honour of letting me write her mother’s story. It occurred to me then that I have never read anything about babies born in concentration camps and my research led me to Eva Clarke and her mother Anka. She had been a prisoner in Auschwitz – just like my three mothers –and had given birth to a baby there, which had died. I was reading something late one night online about a woman who had died in Canada in her 90s. Without doubt, it is the most important book I will ever write.īy luck. It has been published in 21 countries and translated into 16 languages so far. Seventy years on and now living in America and Britain, these ‘siblings of the heart’ have come together for the first time to tell the remarkable stories of the three mothers who defied death to give them life.

Against all the odds, their babies did too.

Somehow, all three women managed to survive. By the time they arrived, the Nazis had killed their fathers and their mothers were ‘walking skeletons,’ living moment to moment in the same concentration camp. Their babies were born weighing just three pounds within weeks of each other in the most horrendous of circumstances. Born Survivors tells the story of three young women pregnant by their husbands during World War Two and praying for a brighter future.

Marrying Up by Wendy Holden