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

9:16Dr. David Kessler:Corn syrup, corn solids, maltodextrin, dextrose, xylose, high fructose corn syrup. And then these ingredients were subjected to 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.

9:45Bill Whitaker: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?

10:12Dr. David Kessler:My stance on vaccines is the same. People should have good science and they should have choice.

10:17Bill Whitaker:Some doctors worry that the new immunization schedule sows confusion and will lead some Americans not to vaccinate their children.

10:28Dr. David Kessler:People who want to get those vaccines can get them, and they can get them fully insured. The 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?

11:04Bill Whitaker:I don't think it's a question of trust, Bill.

11:07Dr. David Kessler: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.

11:22Bill Whitaker:In December, San Francisco City 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.

12:12Bill Whitaker:Oh, my granddaddy. Yeah. Oreos. We met with food author Michael Pollan, who for decades has been warning about inexpensive, factory-processed food.

12:23Dr. David Kessler: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.

12:39Bill Whitaker:But this is sold as health food. Paulin commends Kennedy for shining a light on ultra-processed foods. He ties their ubiquity to long-standing federal farm subsidies.

12:52Dr. David Kessler: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.

13:03Bill Whitaker:What's wrong with corn and soybeans?

13:05Dr. David Kessler:When you hear corn and soy, you think food. This is not corn on the cob. This is commodity corn.

13:10Bill Whitaker:It's not the sweet corn we eat in the summer?

13:13Dr. David Kessler:No, 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 edamame. You can't eat it. These are raw ingredients for processed foods and animal feed.

13:30Bill Whitaker:So the government is subsidizing crops that are making us unhealthy. Yes, yeah.

13:37Dr. David Kessler:Yeah. One way to look at it is we are supporting both sides in the war on type 2 diabetes. We are 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.

13:54Bill Whitaker: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?

14:20Dr. David Kessler: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.

14:37Bill Whitaker:When you're taking on ultra-processed foods, you're also taking on powerful industries, big ag, big food. What makes you believe you will prevail?

14:49Dr. David Kessler:My belief that I will prevail is because we have the president behind us.

14:54Bill Whitaker:But the president has shown himself to be pretty much against regulations. So why would he support regulating ultra-processed foods? I'm not saying that we're going to regulate ultra-processed food.

15:08Dr. David Kessler:Our job is to make sure that everybody understands what they're getting to have an informed public.

15:13Bill Whitaker:There are Americans who live in so-called food deserts with little access to whole foods. And these are foods that many of them can't afford anyway. So how do you speak to that American?

15:27Dr. David Kessler:We are laser-focused on making all of these foods affordable and accessible to every American.

15:34Bill Whitaker:The Consumer Brands Association told us the GRAS process enables companies to innovate to meet consumer demand and that food companies adhere to FDA science and risk-based evaluation of ingredients before and after they are in the marketplace. David Kessler says that's not enough.

15:53Dr. David Kessler:We change how this country views tobacco. We need to change how this country views these ultra-processed foods.

16:04Bill Whitaker: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?

16:15Dr. David Kessler:I'd like them to understand the consequences of what they are doing and to do something about it.

16:29Lesley Stahl:Michael Pollan's Food Rules to Live By.

16:32Dr. David Kessler:If you can't pronounce the ingredients, it's not food.

16:35Lesley Stahl:At 60MinutesOvertime.com.

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17:42Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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 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.

18:43Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Everyone keeps calling you the babies. Yes. And you're 80. Yes. Are you okay with that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We're proud of it. Totally. Eva Clark, Hanna Berger Moran, and Mark Olski are among, if not the, youngest survivors of the Holocaust. April 12th.

19:05Lesley Stahl:April 20th. April 29th.

19:08Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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 Hanna's mother, Priska, also from Czechoslovakia, were young Jewish women in a world that was about to be shattered.

19:35Lesley Stahl:My dear late mother grew up in a small town, and her parents were owners of a little cafe, a little Jewish cafe.

19:44Dr. David Kessler:She had eight siblings.

19:46Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Mark's mother was from a textile manufacturing town. Eva's from east of Prague.

19:52Lesley Stahl:She was a champion swimmer, junior backstroke swimming champion of Czechoslovakia.

19:57Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:For the whole country?

19:58Lesley Stahl:For the whole country, yeah.

20:00Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Wow. And they each fell in love with their husbands as Europe was descending into war.

20:05Lesley Stahl:My late father was a journalist.

20:08Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:How did they meet?

20:10Lesley Stahl:They met, I believe, in a nightclub across the crowded room.

20:15Dr. David Kessler:She avoided going into detail. She talked about things.

20:18Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Mark's mother never told him much about his father, but she did speak of him to Mark's son, her grandson, Charlie.

20:26Dr. David Kessler:She told me that I looked like him.

20:28Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And I said, really?

20:29Dr. David Kessler:And she said, but that's it. He was so elegant. You're nothing like him. You're nothing like him.

20:34Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But soon after the newly married couple moved into their first apartment in Warsaw, German soldiers came one morning and seized it.

20:43Dr. David Kessler:She was still in her nightgown. She said she still had her toothbrush. And she was just sent into the streets.

20:50Lesley Stahl:They took my grandparents in 1942, my aunt in 1943.

20:56Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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 Lodz ghettos. Eva's were sent to a Czech camp called Terezin, where she was conceived in violation of camp rules.

21:17Lesley Stahl:To become pregnant in a concentration camp was considered a crime by the Nazis.

21:23Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:For a Jewish person to get pregnant was a crime?

21:26Lesley Stahl:A crime, because, you know, they were trying to murder, they were trying to annihilate every member of the Jewish people.

21:31Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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, Hannah's mother alongside her husband.

21:51Lesley Stahl: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 the train to Auschwitz. Did they know anything about Auschwitz? Oh, they did. They already knew those were death camps.

22:10Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The arrival platform at the Auschwitz-Birkenau 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?

22:44Lesley Stahl:Once, about a 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.

23:02Lesley Stahl:Think only good thoughts. He just kept repeating that sentence.

23:06Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And that's the last time they ever saw each other.

23:09Lesley Stahl:Yeah.

23:14Lesley Stahl:I wish I would have known him.

23:18Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Prisoners endured frequent selections, some by Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, known for his gruesome experiments on camp inmates. When Mengele came by...

23:30Lesley Stahl:She met Mengele? She did. And Mengele 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, nein, I'm not.

23:48Dr. David Kessler: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.

23:57Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Author 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,

24:07Dr. David Kessler:and they each denied it.

24:08Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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?

24:20Dr. David Kessler:No.

24:21Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And they never knew about each other. It was so important that they didn't reveal their pregnancies. They were among more than 1 ,000 women prisoners working 12-hour shifts in a massive converted porcelain factory, manufacturing parts for German fighter planes.

24:37Dr. David Kessler:Living on really a diet of water, ersatz 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.

24:55Lesley Stahl:During the six months she was there she was becoming progressively more and more starved and more 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.

25:10Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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

25:24Dr. David Kessler:and they were going to send them to be gassed and just kill them all.

25:28Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

25:52Dr. David Kessler:And the guards watched. And they took bets on whether it was going to be a boy or a girl.

25:57Lesley Stahl:The guards watched the baby being born.

26:00Dr. David Kessler:Yes.

26:00Lesley Stahl:My mom said it was like a show. And I said, Mom, were you embarrassed? I didn't have a chance to be embarrassed. You were being born. That was all that mattered to me.

26:12Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:36 hours later, the slave laborers and newborn Hannah were loaded onto the same train. This time it was in open coal wagons,

26:23Lesley Stahl: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.

26:42Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:She's nine months pregnant effectively.

26:44Lesley Stahl: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?

27:08Dr. David Kessler: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.

27:15Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Did people die in this car?

27:17Dr. David Kessler:Yes. I mean, they literally threw them off the train. Yeah. She was lying down, 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.

27:30Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:So she's surrounded by dying people and gives birth with a woman's foot on her stomach. I mean, this is beyond inhumanity.

27:39Dr. David Kessler: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.

27:52Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:She learned the date was April 20th.

27:55Dr. David Kessler:Somebody announced on the train, ah, it's Hitler's birthday today. And so that was his birthday.

28:00Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You were born on Hitler's birthday?

28:02Dr. David Kessler:Yes.

28:03Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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 camps standing. Eva's mother went into labor just as the train arrived.

28:19Lesley Stahl: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.

28:32Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I think I would give up. I'm sure I would give up.

28:35Lesley Stahl: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.

28:52Dr. David Kessler:She was hauled up through the wooded valley. While she's in labor? While she's in labor.

28:58Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Oh, my gosh.

28:59Dr. David Kessler: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.

29:15Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

29:35Lesley Stahl:So had the train arrived on the 26th or 27th, none of us would have survived.

29:40Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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 Hannah with infected sores all over her body until finally help arrived.

30:01Lesley Stahl: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. 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.

30:41Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Wait, they took you off and left her without you? Yes. And she let them do that? Yes.

30:46Lesley Stahl:Yes, she did. She trusted them. Wow. 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.

31:04Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

31:14Dr. David Kessler:He always mentioned, I wonder whatever happened to the baby.

31:18Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Really?

31:19Dr. David Kessler:Yes.

31:20Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:That part of the story when we come back.

31:32Dr. David Kessler:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry. So Rinse will take your laundry and hand-deliver it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.

32:02Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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 compound 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 3rd Army was checking bridges in the area when they came upon the camp almost by accident.

32:55Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

33:11Dr. David Kessler:This is one of a couple.

33:13Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Pete Peterson was drafted into the Army in 1942.

33:17Dr. David Kessler:My dad was a humble man. He always had a smile.

33:23Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Brian Peterson is Pete's youngest son.

33:26Dr. David Kessler:All right, here's the gasket.

33:27Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:He and his two sons have been rebuilding an Army-style Jeep that used to be his dad's.

33:34Dr. David Kessler:Grandpa's going to, he'll be smiling on us.

33:37Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Peterson lived through a Jeep explosion.

33:39Dr. David Kessler:That is the exact time.

33:42Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:When the Jeep was blown up.

33:43Dr. David Kessler:That's when the Jeep was blown up.

33:44Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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?

33:58Dr. David Kessler:From the camps. The smells and the sounds and the sights that bothered him.

34:04Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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. Look at this man. Just skin and bones. Yeah. Peterson's job was to triage which inmates could be helped when he came upon a shocker outside one of the barracks.

34:46Dr. David Kessler:A woman presented her baby to him and showed him that she was badly infected.

34:55Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And he's now just seen all these dead bodies, and there's a baby.

35:00Dr. David Kessler:This one we have to try to save.

35:03Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

35:16Dr. David Kessler:Literally every time that we looked at this book, that was his final thoughts. I wonder whatever happened to that baby.

35:25Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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 Mark's, Eva's, and Hannah's mother's cases, their husbands. Sadly, all three men had died. While Mark's and Eva's mothers later remarried, none of the women had other children. So Mark Olsky, Eva Clark, and Hannah Berger-Moran grew up as only children, learning about the war in bits and pieces from their mothers.

36:04Dr. David Kessler:I was told that I was born on a train, but no details. And so I thought, oh, hey, cool. I was born on that train.

36:14Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:But as he learned the truth, he became enraged.

36:18Dr. David Kessler: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.

36:28Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Yes. He vividly remembers his mother's response.

36:32Dr. David Kessler: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. Wow.

36:48Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Hana's mother raised her in Czechoslovakia. But as an adult, Hana 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.

37:03Lesley Stahl:And she says, please find him.

37:06Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

37:17Lesley Stahl: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.

37:30Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Peterson was 81 at the time.

37:32Dr. David Kessler:Dad mentioned that he had heard from a woman that he believes is the baby that he saved at Mauthausen.

37:44Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Oh, my God. They met in May 2005, 60 years after their first meeting.

37:51Lesley Stahl:I was so happy to finally touch him, see him.

37:57Dr. David Kessler:He was actually staring and looking at her.

38:01Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:I saved that person.

38:03Lesley Stahl: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.

38:15Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Do you think knowing that she survived helped with the PTSD in any way?

38:21Dr. David Kessler:Oh, absolutely. That lifted a big weight off of him.

38:26Lesley Stahl: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.

38:38Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:You adopted him. Let me put it that way. Pete Peterson died five years later. Hannah spent a week with him during his final illness. What's your relationship now?

38:52Lesley Stahl: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.

39:06Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And she was about to get even luckier.

39:09Lesley Stahl:I had found out that it was the 11th Armored Division that had liberated Mauthausen.

39:14Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Eva, whose mother had raised her in the UK, reached out to the Liberators a few years after Hanahad, sending a picture of her mother and three generations of descendants. The photo appeared on the cover of the division's next newsletter.

39:31Lesley Stahl: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.

39:44Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

40:14Dr. David Kessler: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.

40:25Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:A Google search brought him to the website of the 11th Armored Division, where he saw Eva's family photo and story.

40:34Dr. David Kessler: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.

40:48Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:The website's administrator connected him to Eva and Hannah within an hour.

40:55Dr. David Kessler: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. Sure, yeah, why not? I'm there.

41:31Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And that's how the three babies met for the first time in May 2010.

41:36Lesley Stahl: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? Does your mother do that? And we were all incredulous, absolutely incredulous. It was like we've known each other all this time

41:58Dr. David Kessler:and we just had to get caught up on what's happened for the last 65 years.

42:06Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:Hell of a birthday present.

42:07Dr. David Kessler:It was the best birthday present I ever got. The next year I was like, I am just getting a gift certificate.

42:15Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

42:41Lesley Stahl:The U.S. delegation.

42:43Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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?

43:14Lesley Stahl:All I am thinking about is, I've been here before. I've been here before. I have been here before. But I left.

43:26Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

43:50Dr. David Kessler:We found each other. We should have been together from day one.

43:53Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: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.

44:13Dr. David Kessler:I have five grandchildren.

44:16Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:And their mothers live to be 96, 90, and 84. The lines go on.

44:22Lesley Stahl:Life goes on. Let's live. Lord be praised. To our life and to our mothers. To our mothers. Our strong mothers.

44:39Lesley Stahl:The last minute of 60 Minutes.

44:45Dr. David Kessler: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.

45:29Dr. David Kessler: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 Wes Moore.

46:17Dr. David Kessler:A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR. Can you keep a secret? Now streaming on Paramount+. The money from your dad's life insurance finally came through. A new original series. Tired. It turns out I hadn't died. Can You Keep a Secret? New Series, now streaming on Paramount+.