Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Saul David.

Just over 80 years ago on the 5th of May, 1945, a reconnaissance squad from the 11th U.S. Armored Division,

known as the Thunderbolts, led by Sergeant Albert Kosciak, entered Mataz and concentration camp near Linz, Austria to find a scene of unimaginable horror.

Thousands of sorceryed prisoners, many of them catatonic and on the verge of collapse.

A huge number were naked, their skin covered in sores or eaten away by disease. Elsewhere, they found piles

of corpses, some freshly killed. In spite of their appalling physical conditions, some of the prisoners

were rarting, and even more went wild with joy at the sight of their liberators. Their joy soon turned to

angers. They turned on their former tormentors, Austrian and German guards, killing several

with their bare hands. In all, Kossiak and his men liberated 40,000 prisoners at Mathausen and a

neighbouring sub-camp, as well as accepting the surrender of 1800 German prisoners of war.

Incredibly, among the prisoners were three desperately ill young Jewish women, Prisca,

Rachel and Anka, who had recently given birth. All three mothers and babies would survive,

and their extraordinary story unique in the history of the Holocaust, was first told in 2015,

the 70th anniversary of their liberation by former journalist and author Wendy Holden in her book, Born Survivors.

And we've got Wendy on the podcast today. Wendy, welcome back.

Thank you very much indeed. Very nice to be here.

Now, tell me a bit about these three extraordinary women

with iron wills and pretty tough constitutions too, frankly, to survive what they went through.

Tell us a little bit about their background, where they came from. And they all came from

relatively middle-class backgrounds, didn't they? And tell us a bit about the sort of life they led

before the war began. Yes. Well, I mean, I'm sure that was a distant memory to them by the time liberation came,

because they'd all had rather gilded lives in comfortable Jewish homes,

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