60 Minutes - 02/15/2026: Generally Recognized as Safe, Youngest Survivors

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

As an increasing number of Americans across the political spectrum voice concerns about the health risks of ultra-processed foods, correspondent Bill Whitaker speaks with Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Dr. David Kessler. Whitaker reports on a decades-old government classification for substances in our food and why Kennedy and Kessler are calling for change. Eighty years after the end of World War II and liberation of the last remaining Nazi concentration camps, correspondent Lesley Stahl reports on the miraculous story of three pregnant women, and their babies, who survived notorious slave labor and concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Stahl meets the three “babies,” now 80 years old, who were born after their mothers concealed their pregnancies from their Nazi captors and gave birth under the most horrific conditions imaginable. The story of their survival, and how they found each other 65 years later, involves seemingly impossible twists of fate, luck and unfathomable suffering. Stahl also tells the tale of the American medic who was part of the liberation of the camps and discovered, and ultimately helped save, one of the babies. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There is no way for any American to know if a product is safe, if it is ultra-processed. It's hard to find two people who disagree more on health policy than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former FDA commissioner, David Kessler. But they have found common ground over a common culprit, ultra-processed food. How does this compare with tobacco? It's as large, if not larger. Everyone keeps calling you the babies. Yes. And you're 80.

Yes. Eva Clark, Hanna Berger Moran, and Mark Olski are among, if not the, youngest survivors of the Holocaust. A woman presented her baby to him. He's now just seen all these dead bodies, and there's a baby. This one we have to try to save. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelly. I'm Bill Whitaker.

I'm Sharon Al Thansy. I'm John Worthheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Anderson Cooper. Those stories, and in our last minute, filmmaker Ken Burns with a surprise. Tonight on 60 Minutes. Today, an increasing number of Americans across the political spectrum, from Make America Healthy Again activists to everyday shoppers,

are voicing concern about the health impact of ultra-processed foods. Those boxed and wrapped in plastic ready-to-eat items lining grocery store shows. Leading the charge are two men who disagree on pretty much everything else about public health, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Dr. David Kessler, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The two men have found common ground over a common culprit, a 67-year-old government classification for substances in our food. It's called grass, or generally recognized as safe.

Kennedy and Kessler say it has allowed big food companies to use ingredients without a full government safety review and flood the market with ultra-processed foods that now make up 50% of our calories and 60% of our children's diets. Over the last 40 years, the United States has been exposed to something that our biology was never intended to handle. energy-dense, highly palatable, rapidly absorbable, ultra-processed foods that have altered our metabolism and have resulted in the greatest increase in chronic disease in our history. Type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes, hypertension,

abnormal lipids, fatty liver, heart attacks, stroke, heart failure. From our food. From our food. David Kessler was commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration during the 1990s when he helped expose how the tobacco companies manipulated nicotine levels to hook consumers. I am here to provide you with actual instances of nicotine control and manipulation in the tobacco industry. If you raise your right hand. He was a driving force in bringing tobacco.

executives before Congress and turning public attention to the industry. He's now aiming to do the same with the food industry. In terms of a public health crisis, how does this compare with tobacco? It's as large, if not larger. It's that significant. The scale of this, this affects everybody. Understand, not everybody smoke. Look at the number of people who consume ultra-processed food.

It touches all of us. 70% of Americans are either obese or overweight, and it's not because they got indolent or because we became lazy or because we suddenly developed giant appetites. It's because we're being given food that is low in nutrition and high in calories, and it's destroying our health.

I see it when I go across the country. We met with Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., last month after he issued new dietary guidelines that for the first time, advise against highly processed foods. You have said that these ultra-processed foods are poisoning us. I think many Americans would be surprised to hear that. And we're seeing in our population people who are obscenely obese and at the same time malnourished. Who wants us?

Kennedy says that's largely because we don't know the health consequences of what we're eating. Thanks to the grass exemption enacted by Congress in 1958 that allows food companies to independently verify the safety of their ingredients with no government oversight if they are generally recognized by experts as safe. Pending White House approval, he intends to close that back door. That loophole was hijacked by the industry, and it was used to add thousands upon thousands of new ingredients into our food supply. In Europe, there's only 400 legal ingredients.

This agency does not know how many ingredients there are in American food. We do not know. They do not know. The estimates are between 4,000 and 10,000. We have no idea what they are. How do we know what is safe to eat? There is no way for any American to know if a product is safe, if it is ultra-processed. For his part, David Kessler is petitioning Kennedy to go further

and outright revoked the grass status for dozens of processed refined carbohydrate. sweeteners and starches such as corn syrup and maltodextrin, unless the companies can prove they are safe and not fueling obesity. They took starch, right? Those cheap, easy calories, and they converted those into a whole panoply of ingredients that it was able to reassemble. And those products are so rapidly absorbed in our system

that it caused metabolic havoc. They target the brain reward circuits to keep us coming back for more. They trigger overeating. They deprive us of any sense of fullness. What we all call empty calories. Those calories are not just empty. They're ending up in your liver.

And that fat in your liver is going to migrate into other organs, and it's the cause of cardiometabolic disease. Kessler, a pediatrician, filed his petition with the FDA after zeroing in on grass ingredients listed in plain sight on the backs of packaged foods. Pick up any one of these products. You ever look at the ingredient label? A lot of them are things I can't even pronounce.

Right. Is that food? Corn syrup, corn solids, maltodextran, dextrose, xylose, high fructose corn syrup. And then these ingredients were subjected to the... industrial processing, so that our system can't handle it. We will act on David Kessler's petition, and the questions that he's asking are questions

that FDA should have been asking a long, long time ago. Kennedy told us he will use gold standard science to review grass ingredients, but his credibility on that score has been widely called into question because of his history of vaccine skepticism and his agency's revision of the childhood vaccine schedule. Are you concerned at all that your stance on vaccines might make people reluctant to support you on ultra-processed foods? I stand on vaccines the same. People should have good science and they should have choice.

Some doctors worry that the new immunization schedule so is confusion and will lead some Americans not to vaccinate their children. People who want to get those vaccines can get them, and they can get them fully insured. Secretary and I, you know, we disagree on a number of issues. I mean, in the strongest possible terms, when it comes to vaccines, I disagree. But if he's willing to take action on these ultra-processed foods, I will be the first to applaud that. If you don't trust him on vaccines, why trust him when it comes to ultra-processed foods? I don't think it's a question of trust, Bill.

I mean, this country is ill. I'm a doc. I care about the public health of this country, and if we can make progress on that, let's do that. The impact on children has been particularly alarming. In December, San Francisco City Attorney, Attorney. David Chu filed a landmark lawsuit against 10 manufacturers of ultra-processed foods, alleging that, like the tobacco companies, they knowingly engineered and marketed addictive, dangerous products while hiding the risks and causing a public health crisis.

The Consumer Brands Association, one of the largest trade groups representing the food industry, declined to respond to us about the lawsuit, but in a statement to 60 Minutes said, there's no agreed upon scientific definition of ultra-processed foods, and companies adhere to the rigorous evidence-based safety standards and nutrition policy established by the FDA to deliver safe, affordable, and convenient products that consumers depend on every day. Oh, my granddaddy.

Yeah. Oreos. We met with food author Michael Pollan, who for decades has been warning about inexpensive factory-processed food. Granola bars, those look very healthy. All of these would qualify as ultra-processed foods, even though they're very different. You know, we have a snack food, a couple snack foods.

Nature Valley? I would argue because of the number of ingredients in it. So there's a lot of sugar in here. But this is sold as health food. Pollan commends Kennedy for shining a light on ultra-processed foods. He ties their ubiquity to long-standing federal farm subsidies. We subsidize as taxpayers through the farm bill the least healthy calories in the diet, most of which goes to people farming corn and soybeans.

What's wrong with corn and soybeans? When you hear corn and soy, you think food. This is not corn on the cob. This is commodity corn. It's not the sweet corn we eat in the summer? You can't eat it, in fact. It's all starch, big cobs. You'd break your teeth on it.

And then soy, which is not in the form we grow it as a... commodity is not edamami. You can't eat it. These are raw ingredients for processed foods and animal feed. So the government is subsidizing crops that are making us unhealthy? Yes. Yeah. But in one way to look at it is we are supporting both sides in the war on type 2 diabetes. We are we're subsidizing the high fructose corn syrup that's contributing to causing it and then we're paying for the health care costs. I mean, it makes no sense at all. In a statement, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest general farm organization

in the U.S., told us a healthy diet relies on a variety of nutrient-dense foods and a balance of healthy fats, carbohydrates, protein, and fiber, some of which can come from shelf-stable foods. Why are there not subsidies to produce more of the healthy foods? Cheap food is the goal of all governments. If you were to remove these corn subsidies, there's concern that the price of corn would raise, and that would be a problem for the whole food industry, which of course is a very powerful lobby, and would be a problem for the consumer conceivably.

When you're taking on ultra-process foods, you're also taking on powerful industries, big ag, big food. What makes you believe you will prevail? My belief that I will prevail is because we have the president behind us. But the president has shown himself to be pretty much against regulations. So why would he support regulating ultra-processed foods? Well, I'm not saying that we're going to regulate ultra-processed food. Our job is to make sure that everybody understands what they're getting to have an informed public.

There are Americans who live in so-called food deserts with little access to all. Whole Foods. And these are foods that many of them can't afford anyway. So how do you speak to that American? We are laser focused on making all of these foods affordable and accessible to every American. The Consumer Brands Association told us the grass process enables companies to innovate, to meet consumer demand, and that food companies adhere to FDA's science and risk-based evaluation of ingredients before and after they are in the marketplace. David Kessler says that's not enough. We change how this country views tobacco.

We need to change how this country views these ultra-processed foods. Would you like to see the CEOs of big food companies come before Congress and raise their hand and be questioned like the tobacco industry was? I'd like them to understand the consequences of what they are doing and to do something about it. Michael Pollan's food rules to live by. If you can't pronounce the ingredients, it's not food.

At 60 Minutes Overtime.com. Hey, this is Richard Deich, the host of the sports media podcast. If you're interested in what's happening with all the places where you consume sports, the sports media podcast has you covered. I've been turning down interviews all week. Hoda Coppy, reached out, Oprah, George Stephanopoulos, So I said no, I was booked on the Deich podcast before the Taylor Swift phenomenon. I must live up to my responsibility.

Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 a 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. Everyone keeps calling you the babies. And you're 80. Are you okay with that? Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. We're proud of it. Totally. Eva Clark, Hanna-Burger Moran, and Mark Olskiy. are among, if not the, youngest survivors of the Holocaust. April 12th? April 20. April 29th.

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 Hannah's mother, Priska, also from Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia were young Jewish women in a world that was about to be shattered. My dear late mother grew up in a small town, and her parents were owners of a little

cafe, little Jewish cafe. She had eight siblings. Mark's mother was from a textile manufacturing town, Eva's from east of Prague. She was a champion swimmer, junior backstroke swimming champion of Czechoslovakia. For the whole country? For the whole country? Yeah. Wow. And they each fell in love with their husbands as Europe was descending into war. My late father was a journalist. How did they meet? They met, I believe, in a nightclub across the crowded room.

She avoided going into detail. 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. 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...

But soon after the newly married couple moved into their first apartment in Warsaw, German soldiers came one morning and seized it. She was still in her nightgown. She said she still had her toothbrush. And she was just sent into the streets. They took my grandparents in 1942, 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 lodge ghettos.

Evas were sent to a Czech camp called Terazine, where she was conceived in violation of camp rules. To become pregnant in a concentration camp was considered a crime by the Nazis. For a Jewish person to get pregnant was a crime. 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, Hanna's mother alongside her husband. They were sitting in the train on the floor, and my mother is saying, if it's a girl, it's going to be Hannah.

If it's a boy, it will be Michael. This is on the train to Auschwitz. On a train to Auschwitz. Did they know anything about Auschwitz? Oh, they did. They already knew those were death camps. The arrival platform at the Auschwitz-Burgnau concentration camp was a place of unimaginable cruelty.

Families were ripped apart, with most, including mothers with children and the elderly, sent straight to death in gas chambers that at their peak murdered 6,000 people a day. The lucky few selected for work, including the three women, were stripped, shaven, and sent to overflowing barracks. Did your mother ever see your father again? Once, about the week after they got there. She saw him across the barbed wire fence, and my dad said to her,

be careful and think only good thoughts. Think only good thoughts. He just kept repeating that sentence. And that's the last time they ever saw each other. Yeah. I wish I would have known him. Prisoners endured frequent selections, some by Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele,

known for his gruesome experiments on camp inmates. When Mangela came by, she met Mangala? She did. And Mangela is looking at her. She's standing in the line with other women. Yeah. Unfortunately naked. And he looks at her and says in German, good-looking woman, are you pregnant? And my mother says, nine, I'm not. Each of them at that moment had to decide whether to confess that they were or to deny it, whether that would save them and their unborn child or not. Wendy Holden has studied Auschwitz and written a book about the three babies and their mothers.

Each of them sensed that they were in the presence of great danger, and they each denied it. All three women lie to Mengele, and all three women get sent to a slave labor camp in Germany. Freiburg Saxony, yes. Did the three ever meet? No. And they never knew about each other. It was so important that they didn't reveal their pregnancies. They were among more than a thousand women prisoners working 12-hour shifts in a massive converted porcelain factory,

manufacturing parts for German fighter planes. Living on really diet of water, Ersat's coffee in the morning and thin soup and maybe a tiny piece of bread every day. How did they hide their pregnancy? They were given each of them at Auschwitz clothing from those who'd been gassed, and they each of them fortunately ended up with baggy dresses. During the six months she was there, she was becoming progressively, more and more starved and more obviously pregnant. But fortunately, none of the Germans realized she was pregnant, because had they done so, they might well have sent her back to Auschwitz to be killed. But by the early spring of 1945, the Allies were advancing.

Auschwitz had been liberated, and plans were being made to get rid of the slave laborers. The Germans decided they had to eradicate the evidence. and they were going to send them to be gassed and just kill them all. They knew they were losing the Germans. They knew that the Americans or the Russians were going to come in. Yes. And they did not want them to know how badly they had treated these people. Very much so. And also, there was no more work.

All the materials had dried up. They weren't really even feeding them anymore. That's when Hannah's mother went into labor on the factory floor. On a plank that was put across a table, and the guards watched, and they took bets on whether it was going to be a boy or a girl. The guards watched the baby being born. Yes.

My mom said it was like a show. And I said, Mom, were you embarrassed? I didn't have chance to be embarrassed. You were being born. That was all that mattered to me. 36 hours later, the slave laborers and newborn Hanna were loaded onto the same train. This time, it was in open coal wagons.

So open to the skies and filthy. This was the death train. It was the death train. They were looking for a camp where they could kill all these women. She said it was a nightmare of a journey. Sixteen days on the train. No food and hardly any water. She's nine months pregnant, effectively.

Yes. And at one point, the train was stopped, and the doors were opened, and a farmer walked by, and he saw my mother. And he had such a shock. My mother described herself as looking like a scarcely living pregnant skeleton. And this farmer brought her a glass of milk. She maintained that saved her life. Who knows? My grandmother in the meantime had gotten so ill.

She was under 70 pounds and nine months pregnant, and they put her in the sick car. Did people die in this car? Yes. I mean they literally threw them off the train? Yeah. She was lying down, and there was a woman with a woman with a woman with a car. and there was a woman with a bad leg, and she had to put her leg up on her pregnant stomach

because that was the highest place in the train to rest it. So she's surrounded by dying people and gives birth with a woman's foot on her stomach. I mean, this is beyond inhumanity. Yes. Somehow she gave birth. She didn't think she would. She thought she was going to die.

And she figured she would have given birth to a dead baby that her body couldn't sustain it, but he was alive. And she figured, but I won't have milk. But she did. She learned the date was April 20th. Somebody announced on the train, Ah, it's Hitler's birthday today.

And so that was his birthday. You were born on Hitler's birthday? Yes. After nine more days on that train, they reached a camp in Austria that was meant to be their end, Mauthausen, one of the last camp standing. Eva's mother went into labor

just as the train arrived. She had to climb off the coal truck. unaided. She had to climb onto a cart because the prisoners who were not strong enough to walk up the steep hill to the camp, they had to get on carts and they were pulled up by others. I think I would give up. I'm sure I would give up. Well, that's what I used to say to my mother, that I would have given up at the first hurdle. I would have collapsed. She said, you have no idea. She said, you just don't know what you can withstand until you have to. And she said, unfortunately, most people are not tested.

She was hauled up through the wooded valley. While she's in labor? While she's in labor. Oh my gosh. And she remembers looking back, you look down onto the river Danube, it was April, so there were blossoms and birds singing. And she said, she thought it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen, and she also thought it would be the last thing she'd ever see.

But it wasn't the last thing she'd see for a stunning reason. The last day the gas chambers at Mauthausen were used was the day before. On the 28th of April, 1945, the Nazis had run out of gas. So wait, you arrived one day after the gas ran out. And out. So had the train arrived on the 26th, 27, none of us would have survived. Every little tiny factor of this story is amazing. Yes. Well, I call them the Miracle Babies and with very good reason.

miraculous too that they managed to survive at Mauthausen for almost a week baby Hanna with infected sores all over her body until finally help arrived my mom she saw a little green army car and music roll out the barrels roll out the barrels da da da da da da da and she said this is no German she knew the song oh yeah and suddenly young soldier with a helmet, red cross on it, comes walking by. And my mother says to him in English, I have something to show you. That something was Hana. He said to my mother in English, I'll get the doctor because your baby needs help.

And he ran and brought the doctor. They took me. Wait, they took you off and left her without you? Yes. And she let them do that? Yes. Yes, she did. She trusted them.

And the next day, a nurse came, me wrapped in bandages. And my mother says, is she dead? Oh. And the nurse said, no, no, she's not. She's sleeping. Hana's mother never forgot that young American medic who saved her baby's life. And it turns out that medic never forgot Hana either. He always mentioned, I wonder what?

whatever happened at the baby. Really? Yes. That part of the story when we come back. The heroism of American fighters in the fierce battles of World War II is legendary. But for some of those young soldiers, among their most searing wartime memories, were what they witnessed after the shooting stopped when they entered Nazi concentration camps as liberators.

One of those camps was Mauthausen, a fortress-like country. high on a hill west of Vienna, where more than 95,000 prisoners died, and where three babies and their mothers arrived on April 29, 1945. Six days later, a small unit of two dozen soldiers from the 11th armored division of General Patton's Third Army, was checking bridges in the area when they came upon the camp almost by accident. a warning, the images of what they found are disturbing. One of the soldiers that day was a 22-year-old medic from Illinois named Leroy Pete Peterson.

This is the scrapbook that he kept. This is one of a couple. Pete Peterson was drafted into the Army in 1942. My dad was a humble man. He always had a smile. Brian Peterson is Pete. his youngest son. All right, here's a gasket.

He and his two sons have been rebuilding an army-style Jeep that used to be his dad's. You know, grandpa's gonna, he'll be smiling on us. Peterson lived through a Jeep explosion. That is the exact time. When the Jeep was blown up. He survived. And fought in the Battle of the Bulge before his unit liberated Mauthausen. He suffered years later from PTSD.

Do you think it was from the battles, or do you think it was from the camps? From the camps? The smells and the sounds and the sights that bothered him. This official U.S. Army photo of Americans liberating Mauthausen captures the joy of prisoners finally being freed, but the photos Peterson kept in his scrapbook show a far darker reality. He took these? Yes.

Oh. Piles of... emaciated corpses. Oh my God, oh my God. And in this photo, a man who died right in front of Peterson's eyes. And look at this man. Just skin and bones. Peterson's job was to triage which inmates could be helped

when he came upon a shocker outside one of the barracks. A woman presented her baby to him and showed him that she was badly infected. And he's now just seeing all these dead bodies, and there's a baby. This one we have to try to save. Peterson told Brian that he and the unit doctor used penicillin, brand new at the time, to treat the baby's wounds and helped sew her up.

He never got the incident out of his mind. Literally, every time that we looked at this book, that was his final thoughts. I wonder whatever happened to that baby. In the weeks after liberation, that baby and her mother, like many freed prisoners, traveled back to their hometowns across Europe in hopes of finding living family members, and in Marx, Eva's and Hannah's mother's cases, their husbands. Sadly, all three men had died. While Marks and Eva's mothers later remarried, none of the women had other children.

So Mark Olski, Eva Clark, and Hanna Berger Moran grew up as only children, learning about the war in bits and pieces from their mothers. I was told that I was born on a train, but no details. And so I thought, oh, hey, cool, I'm born. I was born on that train. But as he learned the truth, he became enraged. When I was 12, 13, people asked me, what do you want to do with your life? And I said, I want to go to Europe and just kill as many Germans as I can.

Yes. He vividly remembers his mother's response. In almost the exact words, she said, they took so much from us. If this is what you become like, they will have taken your soul. Oh, she said that to you? Wow. Hanna's mother raised her in Czechoslovakia. But as an adult, Hanna moved to Israel, then to the United States for graduate school.

Her mother sent her off with a request. Try to track down that young American medic. And she says, please find him. Find him. Find him. Were you supposed to do that? I didn't know his name. She discovered it was the 11th armored division that liberated Mauthausen and sent them a letter.

I was getting various messages. This name, that name. I got in touch with them. Oh, no, it's not me. And finally, I get the message, oh, you want to talk to Pete Peterson. Peterson was 81 at the time. Dad mentioned that he had heard from a woman

that he believes is the baby, that he saved it, Matt Housing. Oh, my God. They met in May 2005, 60 years after their first meeting. I was so happy to finally touch him, see him. He was actually staring and looking at her. I saved that person.

That's you, that's you, that's really you. And I was able to thank him finally, truly thank him because he saved my life. He did. Do you think knowing that she survived helped with the PTSD and the any way? Oh, absolutely. That lifted a big weight off of him. And I asked him if I can call him Daddy Pete. Daddy Pete? I didn't have a father, you know, so he became my daddy. He adopted you. Well, he had no choice. You adopted him. Let me put it that way. Pete Peterson died five years later. Hanna spent a week with him during his final illness. What's your

relationship now. She's my big sister. Exactly. And he better listen to his big sister. From the past, nobody survived. So I have my family. I am so lucky. And she was about to get even luckier.

I had found out that it was the 11th Armored Division that had liberated Mountausen. Eva, whose mother had raised her in the UK, reached out to the Liberators a few years after few years after Hana had, sending a picture of her mother and three generations of descendants. The photo appeared on the cover of the division's next newsletter. I opened this magazine, and I said to my mother, you're not going to believe this. There was Hannah's story. Another baby. Another baby. Up to that point, my mother had always thought that we were the only ones.

So she had no idea about these other two. No idea. The two babies spoke and made plans to meet just after their 65th birthdays at the Mauthausen camp. Now a preserved memorial where the anniversary of liberation would be celebrated. And that's where baby number three comes in. That same spring, Mark's son Charlie was struggling to find a 65th birthday present for his dad. He's very hard to shop for. So I thought, maybe I'll do some research, see if I can find somebody who has a story.

It must have been really miraculous to have a baby in a concentration camp. A Google search brought him to the website of the 11th Armored Division, where he saw Eva's family photo and story. And I looked at the story, and it was everything I'd ever heard from my grandmother. Everything matched up. It was the labor camp in Freiburg that the mother had the pregnancy, that they had run out of gas. The dates, everything lined up, and I couldn't believe it.

The website's administrator connected him to Eva and Hanna within an hour. Hannah was in San Francisco and wrote me back immediately. Oh, my gosh. And said, this is incredible. We're meeting for the first time in two weeks at the camp. So it's too bad you're just finding us now. And I thought too bad nothing. This is great.

We're coming. First thing he said, first thing out of his mouth that I heard, was, would you like to go to Austria with me around the time of your birthday? My mind is, one of my kids wants to spend a bunch of time with me? I'm sure. Yeah, why not? I'm there. And that's how the three babies met for the first time in May 2010.

We spent the whole of the Saturday in one cafe talking, laughing and crying and talking about our mothers. and comparing and contrasting their three stories. Does your mother do this? That's your mother do that. And we were all incredulous, absolutely incredulous. It was like we've known each other all this time, and we just had to get caught up on what happened for the last 65 years. Hell of a birthday present.

It was the best birthday present I ever got. The next year I was like, I'm just getting a gift certificate. That year, at age 65, they marched in the annual commemoration at Mauthausen. This past year, at 80, they marched again at the special 80th anniversary celebration, where thousands came from all over the world to remember the prisoners who worked and died here, and their liberators. The U.S. delegation. Brian Peterson made the trip to honor his father. While the son of the U.S. sergeant, who led his soldiers into the camp, played taps.

And while the babies were far too young to have their own memories, they told us inside one of the still-standing barracks that they couldn't help but sense the presence of their mothers. What are you feeling in this place? Do you carry her emotions with you? All I am thinking about is I've been here before. I've been here before. I have been here before. But I left. At all the 80th anniversary commemorations like this concert in Vienna,

the three babies were celebrated guests of honor. Happy birthday. Quite the journey from how their lives began. How would you describe this relationship? It's one of siblings. And I'm very glad to have siblings. We found each other. We should have been together from day one.

You certainly and your mothers absolutely were marked for death. You were supposed to be annihilated. My mother occasionally would say, and in the end, we won. Because you all survived. And we have families. How many grandchildren? I have four. I have two.

I have five grandchildren. And their mothers live to be 96, 90, and 84. The lines go on. Life goes on. Let's live. Lord be praised. Leheim. To our life and to our mothers.

To our mothers. To our mothers. Yes. The last minute of 60 minutes. Filmmaker Ken Burns has given viewers new understanding of American history with his documentaries, including the Civil War and the American Revolution. To mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we asked Burns, what would surprise the nation's founders about America today?

I think the founders would be very pleased that their revolution became a model for democracies around the world. I think they would also be surprised, pleasantly so, that we are still here 250 years later. They were hugely concerned about the strains on the new country. If they were to magically arrive in this moment, I think they would be troubled about how stressed our system of checks and balances is, but equally impressed that we've been able to overcome significant national and global challenges.

They would be disappointed, I think, not because of how divided we are, we always have been, but how we are increasingly struggling to acknowledge our shared values. My hope for the 250th anniversary of our founding is that Americans understand that democracy and self-governance requires our constant attention. The best way to commemorate the 250th is to study our history in all its complexities and to vote.

I'm Anderson Cooper. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. But coming up next, a special CBS News, Things That Matter, Town Hall with Maryland Governor West Moore. Thank you.