Mauthausen-Erinnerungen 1: Clare Parker

Clare Parker was born Klara Hochhauser in 1932 in Budapest. Discrimination under the Horthy Regime and the mass deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews after the German invasion in March 1944 marked an abrupt change in the life of young Klara. Together with her mother, Magda, she was deported first to Auschwitz and later to Lenzing, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Her mother died in Lenzing, while her now seriously ill father was liberated from Bergen-Belsen. After the end of the war Klara Hochhauser lived with her father in Budapest. During the Hungarian popular uprising in 1956, they both fled to London, where her father died a short time later from the long-term effects of his imprisonment. Only decades later, after having built a new life in London, was Clare – as she now called herself – able to learn the facts about her mother’s death in the concentration camp. This led her to begin dealing with these traumatic experiences for the first time, giving interviews to the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg, and to the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project, as well as writing down her life story. Clare Parker has two grown-up children and now lives in London.

This new edition of the work, which was first published in 2006, contains detailed comments and annotations.