'It is very moving': Holocaust survivors reveal war stories ahead of War Museum exhibition opening
ITV News Correspondent Dan Rivers speaks to Holocaust survivors who have contributed their stories to a new gallery designed to remember the genocide
Two Holocaust survivors have recounted the horrors of the Second World War ahead of the opening of two new Imperial War Museum (IWM) galleries curated in memory of the atrocities.
Eva Clarke, 76, was born in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on 29 April 1945-just under a week before its liberation and a day after the Nazis ran out of gas for its chambers.
Her birth certificate will be among the 3,500 objects on display at the museum's new permanent exhibition, which will use personal stories and interactive displays to shine a light on one of the darkest periods of human history.
The genocide during the Second World War saw millions of Jews and other minorities locked in concentration camps and killed at the hands of the Nazis.
"It's very moving actually. It makes me really rather emotional," Ms Clarke told ITV News as she described the genocide which claimed the lives of 15 of her family members, including her father.
"Mauthausen was one of the most notorious Nazi death camps - the main form of torture there was a quarry where prisoners had to work all daylight hours."
She largely credits her survival to Hitler's suicide and the American liberation of the concentration camp in upper Austria by US troops on May 5 1945.
Three weeks after American liberation of the camp, soldiers captured fleeting images of Ms Clarke's mother - Anka Kaudrová - cradling her as a three-pound baby.
Ms Kaudrová, who emigrated with her daughter from Prague to Cardiff in 1948, had spent three and a half years in concentration camps since December 1941, including Auschwitz.
She had wanted to give the birth certificate to a museum for "many, many years" after the end of the war, but died in 2013 before deciding on the right one.
Eva Clarke says her mother wanted to donate the birth certificate to a museum before she died
Ms Clarke said she would be pleased that her story now features in the IWM's exhibition, which is three times the size of IWM London's award-winning First World War Galleries.
The £30.5 million project has been seven years in the making.
John Hajdu, another Holocaust survivor, helped to translate some documents from Hungarian, including a postcard thrown from a cattle truck full of Jewish people bound for Auschwitz.
He is a survivor of the genocide in Hungary and lived under the subsequent socialist regime in Budapest.
The teddy bear that comforted John throughout the trials of the camps and ghettos is one artefact that won't be displayed at the museum.
'Looking at my Teddy reminds me of my life,' says Holocaust survivor John Hajdu
"We had to flee, we had to run. We had no choice but to leave everything behind," he told ITV News.
"The fact that I managed to save Teddy... and when I look at Teddy it reminds me of my life really.
"Also, it helps to explain to both the schoolchildren and my own children what I have been through."