A

Everyone keeps calling you the babies and you're 80.

B

Yes.

A

Eva Clark, Hannah Berger Moran and Mark Olski are among, if not the youngest survivors of the Holocaust.

C

A woman presented her baby to him.

A

He's now just seen all these dead bodies and. And there's a baby.

C

This one we have to try to save.

D

The ocean off Cape Town, South Africa, used to be teeming with great white sharks. Each morning, with a little luck, you could catch sight of them flying out of the water.

E

Whoa.

D

But then they began to disappear. Tonight, a story that has all the hallmarks of a true crime series with plenty of twists and a surprise suspect. I mean, it is like something out of csi. It's like you're the detective.

A

I'm Leslie Stahl.

C

I'm John Wertheim.

D

I'm Anderson Cooper.

F

I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

A

May 2025, mark 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 were 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 and 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 were 80 years old when we first met them last year involves narrow misses, seemingly impossible twists of fate and luck, unimaginable suffering and miracles. Everyone keeps calling you the babies, and you're 80.

B

Yes.

A

Are you okay with that?

B

Oh, yeah.

F

Oh, yeah.

G

Absolutely. We're proud of it.

F

Totally.

A

Eva Clark, Hannah Berger Moran, and Mark Olsky are among, if not the youngest survivors of the Holocaust.

G

April 12, April 20, April 29.

A

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 Prisca, also from Czechoslovakia, were young Jewish women in a world that was about to be shattered.

F

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

B

She had eight siblings.

A

Mark's mother was from a textile manufacturing town. Eva's from east of Prague.

G

She was a champion swimmer, junior backstroke swimming champion of Czechoslovakia.

A

For the whole country.

G

For the whole country, yes.

B

Wow.

A

And they each fell in love with their husbands as Europe was descending into war.

F

My late father was a journalist.

A

How did they meet?

G

They met, I believe, in a nightclub across a crowded room.

B

She avoided going into details. She talked about things.

A

Mark's mother never told him much about his father. But she did speak of him to Mark's son, her grandson Charlie.

H

She told me that I looked like him. And I said, really? And she said, but that's it.

F

He.

H

He was so elegant. You're nothing like him.

A

But soon after the newly married couple moved into their first apartment in Warsaw. German soldiers came one morning and seized it.

H

She was still in her nightgown. She said she still had her toothbrush and she was just sent into the streets.

F

They took my grandparents in 1942, my aunt.

A

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 Lodz ghettos. Eva's were sent to a Czech camp called Terezin, where she was conceived in violation of camp rules.

G

To become pregnant in a concentration camp was considered a crime by the Nazis.

A

For a Jewish person to get pregnant was a crime.

G

A crime because, you know, they were trying to murder, they were trying to annihilate every member of the Jewish people.

A

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.

F

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.

A

This is on the train to Auschwitz.

F

On the train to Auschwitz.

A

Did they know anything about Auschwitz?

F

Oh, they did. They already knew those were death camps.

A

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?

F

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. Think only good thoughts. He just kept repeating that sentence.

A

And that's the last time they ever saw each other.

F

Yeah, I wish I would have known him.

A

Prisoners endured frequent selections, some by Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, known for his gruesome experiments on camp inmates.

F

When Mengele came by, 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.

E

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.

A

Author Wendy Holden has studied Auschwitz and written a book about the three babies and their mothers.

E

Each of them sensed that they were in the presence of great danger and they each denied it.

A

All three women lie to Mengele and all three women get sent to a slave labor camp in Germany.

E

Freiburg, Saxony? Yes.

A

Did the three ever meet?

E

No. And they never knew about each other. It was so important that they didn't reveal their pregnancies.

A

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, living on really diet

E

of water, ersatz coffee in the morning and thin soup and maybe a tiny piece of bread every day.

A

How did they hide their pregnancy?

E

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.

G

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.

A

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.

E

The Germans decided they had to eradicate the evidence and they were going to send them to be gassed and just kill them all.

A

They knew they were losing the Germans. They knew that the Americans over were going to come in and they did not want them to know how badly they had treated these people.

E

Very much so. And also there was no more work. All the materials had dried up. They weren't really even feeding them anymore.

A

That's when Hannah's mother went into labor on the factory floor on a plank

E

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.

A

The guards watched the baby being born.

E

Yes.

F

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.

A

36 hours later, the slave laborers and newborn Hannah were loaded onto the same train.

G

This time it was in open coal wagons, so open to the skies and filthy.

A

This was the death train.

F

It was the death train. They were looking for a camp where they could kill all these women.

G

She said it was a nightmare of a journey.

A

Sixteen days on the train, no food

G

and hardly any water.

A

She's nine months pregnant.

G

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?

H

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.

A

Did people die in this car?

H

Yes.

B

I mean, they literally threw them off the train.

H

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.

A

So she's surrounded by dying people and gives birth with a woman's foot on her stomach. I mean, this is beyond inhumanity.

H

Yes. Somehow she gave birth. She didn't think she would.

A

She thought she was going to die,

H

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.

A

She learned the date was April 20.

H

Somebody announced on the train, it's Hitler's birthday today. And so that was his birthday.

A

You were born on Hitler's birthday?

B

Yes.

A

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.

G

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.

A

I think I would give up. I'm sure I would give up.

G

Well, that's what I used to say to my mother, that I would have given. 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.

E

She was hauled up through the wooded

A

valley while she's in labor.

E

While she's in labor.

A

Oh, my gosh.

E

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.

A

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,

G

on 28th April, 1945. The Nazis had run out of.

A

So wait, you arrive one day after the gas ran out and out.

G

So had the train arrived on the 26th, 27th. None of us would have survived.

A

Every little tiny factor of this story is amazing.

E

Yes, well, I call them the miracle babies, and with very good reason.

A

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.

F

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 not German.

A

She knew the song.

F

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.

A

That something was Hannah.

F

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.

A

Wait, they took you off and left her without you?

F

Yes.

A

And she let them do that?

F

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?

I

Oh.

F

And the nurse said, no, no, she's not. She's sleeping.

A

Hana's mother never forgot that young American medic who saved her baby's life. And it turns out that medic never forgot Hannah either.

C

He always mentioned, I wonder whatever happened to the baby.

H

Really?

C

Yes.

A

That part of the story. When we come back.

J

History that Doesn't Suck is a legit, hard hitting American history podcast told through entertaining stories as we approach America's 250th anniversary. Now might be the time to go back and learn how we got here. With more than 200 episodes, you can binge your way decade by decade, defining events to defining an event from the founding into the 20th century. Join me, Professor Greg Jackson, for History that Doesn't Suck, an Odyssey podcast, available on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

A

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 the 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. A warning. The images of what they found are disturbing. One of the soldiers that day was a 22 year old medic from Illinois, the named Leroy Pete Peterson. This is the scrapbook that he kept.

C

This is one of a couple.

A

Pete Peterson was drafted into the army in 1942.

C

My dad was a humble man. He always had a smile.

A

Brian Peterson is Pete's youngest son.

C

All right, here's the gasket.

A

He and his two sons have been rebuilding an army style Jeep that used to be his dad's.

C

You know, grandpa's gonna, he'll be smiling at.

A

Peterson lived through a Jeep explosion.

C

That is the exact time when the

A

Jeep was blown up.

C

That's when the Jeep was blown up.

A

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?

C

From the camps. The smells and the sounds and the sights that bothered him.

A

This official US 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.

C

Yes.

F

Oh.

A

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.

C

Just skin.

F

Yeah.

A

Peterson's job was to triage which inmates could be helped. When he came upon a shocker outside one of the barracks.

C

A woman presented her baby to him and showed him that she was badly infected.

A

And he's now just seen all these dead bodies. And there's a baby.

C

This one we have to try to save.

A

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

C

his Mind, literally every time that we looked at this book, that was his final thoughts. I wonder, whatever happened to that baby?

A

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.

B

I was told that I was born on a train, but no details. And so I thought, oh, hey, cool, I was born on a train.

A

But as he learned the truth, he became enraged.

B

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.

A

He vividly remembers his mother's response in

B

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.

A

Oh, she said that to you?

E

Wow.

F

Wow.

A

Hana'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.

F

And she says, please find him. Find him, Find him.

A

How were you supposed to do that?

F

I didn't know his name.

A

She discovered it was the 11th Armored Division that liberated Mauthausen and sent them a letter.

F

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?

A

Peterson was 81 at the time.

C

Dad mentioned that he had heard from a woman that he believes is the baby that he saved at Mauthausen.

A

Oh, my God. They met in May 2005, 60 years after their first meeting.

F

I was so happy to finally touch him, see him.

C

He was actually staring at and looking at her.

A

I saved that person.

F

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.

A

Do you think knowing that she survived helped with the PTSD in any way?

C

Oh, absolutely. That lifted a big weight off of him.

F

And I asked him if I can call him Daddy Pete.

A

Daddy Pete.

F

I didn't have a father, you know, so he became my daddy.

A

He adopted you?

F

Well, he had no Choice.

A

You adopted him. Let me put it that way. Pete Peterson died five years later. Hana spent a week with him during his final illness. What's your relationship now?

C

She's my big sister.

F

Exactly. And he better listen to his big sister from the past. Nobody survived, so I have my family. I am so lucky.

A

And she was about to get even luckier.

G

I had found out that it was the 11th Armored Division that had liberated Mauthausen.

A

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 COVID of the division's next newsletter.

G

I opened this magazine, and I said to my mother, you're not going to believe this. There was Hannah's story.

A

Another baby, Another baby.

G

Up to that point, my mother had always thought that we were the only ones.

A

So she had no idea about these other two?

G

No idea.

A

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.

H

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

A Google search brought him to the website of the 11th Armored Division, where he saw Eva's family photo and story.

H

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.

A

The website's administrator connected him to Eva and Hannah. Within an hour, Hannah was in San

H

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.

F

We're coming.

B

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.

A

And that's how the three babies met for the first time in May 2010,

G

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.

F

Does your mother do this? Does your mother do that?

G

And we were all incredulous, absolutely incredulous.

B

It was like we've known each other all this time and we just had to get caught up on what's happened for the last 65 years.

A

Hell of a birthday present.

B

It was the best birthday present I ever got.

H

The next year I was like, I'm just getting you a gift certificate.

A

That year, at age 65, they marched in the annual commemoration at Mauthausen. In 2025, 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 US Delegation. Brian Peterson made the trip to honor his father, while the son of the US Sergeant who led his soldiers into the camp played taps. And while the babies were falling 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?

F

All I am thinking about is I've been here before. I've been here before. I have been here before, but I left.

A

At all the 80th anniversary commemorations, like this concert in Vienna, the three babies were celebrated guests of honor.

E

Happy birthday.

A

Quite the journey from how their lives began. How would you describe this relationship?

G

It's one of siblings, and I'm very glad to have siblings.

B

We found each other. We should have been together from day one.

A

You certainly, and your mothers absolutely were marked for death. You were supposed to be annihilated.

G

My mother occasionally would say, and in

A

the end we won because you all survived.

G

And we have families.

A

How many grandchildren?

G

I have four.

F

I have two.

B

I have five grandchildren.

A

And their mothers lived to be 96. 90 and 84. The lines go on.

F

Life goes on.

B

Lord be praised.

F

To our lives and to our mothers.

G

To our mothers. Our strong mothers.

K

Yes.

A

Hannah, Mark and Eva turned 81.

E

This.

D

The coastal waters around Cape Town, South Africa, have long teemed with great white sharks. But about 10 years ago, carcasses of these feared predators began washing up on beaches with their livers missing. Now it's hard to find any great whites. Tonight, a story that has all the hallmarks of a whodunit. One that's fueled a bitter feud among scientists and conservationists who can't agree on who or what is the real culprit. As we first reported in April, they do agree on one thing. The great white sharks that once cruised these waters are gone. For as long as anyone can remember, the ocean off Cape Town was the best place in the world to see great whites. There were plenty of smaller sharks for them to hunt and tens of thousands of seals which live on a small stretch of rock nearby called Seal Island. Early each morning, with a little luck, you could catch sight of these majestic predators flying out of the water. Until a little more than a decade ago, Chris Fallows, a photographer and naturalist, used to see 250 to 300 different great white sharks a year. The images he took back then are amongst the most breathtaking of the natural world.

I

It's a sight you never forget. You know, I still kind of get that tingly feeling to see the most spectacular shark on earth now flying out the water. It was truly incredible to see.

D

We saw that ourselves in 2010 when we reported on the great whites here and the tens of thousands of visitors who came each year for a close encounter in cages.

A

That was really something.

D

We were taken diving without a cage in water that had been chummed with blood to attract sharks. Immediately, a 15 foot great white swam straight toward us.

A

That's a big white. This is amazing.

D

It's coming right toward us. Sharks are curious creatures and they circled us constantly. It was extraordinary to be so close to such a massive predator. That's incredible. That's unbelievable.

L

Wow.

D

And I'm so happy I'm back up. But just a few years after. After that dive, sightings of sharks here began to dwindle and the tourists stopped coming.

I

If you went out and did that today, you would see nothing.

D

Why is that?

I

Because their numbers have simply plummeted. Tragically. We have all but lost the great white shark.

D

The disappearance of great whites from here mystified scientists. Allison Koch, a marine biologist with South African national parks, began searching for clues in 2015. Divers sent her these photos of smaller shark carcasses on the sea floor with mysterious incisions in them.

K

It looked so surgical from the photographs that I first assumed it must have been done by somebody with a knife,

D

a fisherman or something.

K

Yes, and it wasn't until the next time it happened that I managed to retrieve some of the cockpit carcasses and study them. And I found tooth marks on the pectoral fins of some of the dead sharks.

D

Those tooth marks suggested the culprits couldn't be human. So Kock and her colleagues went diving for more Evidence and encountered an unlikely suspect. Orcas, Killer whales.

K

We just retrieved one of the carcasses and my research partner says, orca. And here comes two orcas under the boat in our study area. It was light bulb. They were feeding right in that area where we just found the carcass. Now what we have is that orcas are a real possibility for being the culprit for these carcasses.

D

Two years later, great whites began washing ashore with their livers missing. What's so tasty about a shark liver?

K

It's the most calorie dense organ out of the whole body and it takes up almost a third of the shark's body.

D

So they're not trying to eat the entire shark, they're just targeting the liver.

A

1, 2, 3.

D

Koch and her colleagues performed necropsies and confirmed orcas were indeed the culprits. They've been in these waters for years, but no one had ever seen one kill a great white hare, though they are known to hunt them off California and around Australia.

K

For South Africa, this was completely novel because for a long time you go, but white sharks are the apex predators. And this is, I think, why people struggle to sort of believe that this was happening.

D

I mean, it is like something out of csi. It's like you're the detective and I

K

feel like a detective. But for, for a long time we, we did have all of the pieces of the puzzle.

D

David Hurwitz helped put the puzzle together. He's a whale watching tour operator and was the first person to see two very distinctive male orcas hunting and killing sharks. He named them Port and Starboard.

L

What was distinctive about them is that both of their dorsal fins were collapsed, which is very unusual.

D

Like collapsed over, like that one that

L

collapsed to the left, the other one to the right. And being a nautical man, immediately it came to my mind, let's call them Port, Starboard. And that caught on from there and they've become world famous or infamous.

D

Infamous because unlike most orcas which hunt in groups called pods, Port and Starboard were hunting sharks for their livers as a pair there are hunting, hunting on their own in ways people here have never seen before. I mean, are these like serial killers?

L

They are definitely not serial killers.

D

They're eating the livers of. It's like Hannibal Lecter eating liver with fava beans.

L

I am so infatuated by Port Starbuck, you'll never get me to say a bad word against him.

D

Scientists now believe Port and Starboard might even be teaching other orcas how to hunt down sharks. In 2022, this drone footage captured five orcas working together, stunning and then killing a great white.

K

Here's an orca with this big white shark upside down, biting into the area where the liver is.

D

More recently, single orcas have been seen hunting sharks in South Africa and elsewhere. This National Geographic documentary shows an orca striking a great white like a torpedo, stunning it than taking it in its mouth.

K

They're learning. They're learning all the time. I think it's hard for people to kind of understand how smart these animals are.

D

Koch maintains the presence of these smart hunters has chased the once dominant great whites further along the coast and insists that overall the population of great whites in South African waters is stable. The presence of just two orcas, that would drive away hundreds of them.

K

The predator eats the prey and that has an impact on some of the numbers. But one of the biggest things with predation is the fear of predation or the risk of predation and what we call the landscape of fear.

D

But gazelle don't disappear because a lion is killing some gazelle.

K

They've evolved alongside of their predator. White sharks have not. White sharks have been the top dogs. This was a novel predator for them. They were not used to being predated on by another species.

M

Orcas have been killing white sharks for thousands of years.

D

Enrico Gennari is an Italian marine biologist who's been researching great whites in South Africa for 20 years. He doesn't agree with Alison Koch that the population is stable.

M

The question is not. The orcas are pushing white sharks away. Same thing happened in California. Same thing happened in Australia. The question here in South Africa, why they're not coming back.

D

In California, orcas have killed great white sharks. But then the great whites came back.

M

Up to six, nine months. The white shark left, but they always came back.

D

Gennari and photographer Chris Fallows both agree the numbers of great whites plummeted a few years before port and starboard began their killing spree.

I

By the time the great white sharks had completely disappeared from Sioux island, we had never once seen port and starboard at Sea Island.

D

You don't buy this argument that it's these two orcas that have made all the great whites here disappear?

I

I don't buy it one bit. How can you blame somebody that wasn't even on the crime scene?

D

Fallows and Gennari argue humans are ultimately to blame. They've been documented the impact of commercial fishing boats on smaller shark species that are a staple of the great white's diet. The boats lay miles of long lines with thousands of hooks attached on the ocean floor, the sharks they catch are exported to Australia, used for cheap fish and chips.

I

Shark longlining is undoubtedly robbing the great white sharks of food. It's the primary prey source for the great whites when they're not feeding on sea seals. When you remove the prey, you have a significant impact on the predator.

D

An even bigger impact on great whites, Fallows and Gennaries say, are shark nets and baited hooks attached to buoys, which the South African authorities have used to protect swimmers along the coast since the 1950s. Nets and hooks kill more than 20 great whites a year, along with whatever else gets caught by them.

M

The device are designed to kill and lower the population number. The concept is one less shark, one less chance of an encounter with a human.

D

Genari would like to see South Africa embrace a variety of alternatives to protect swimmers, like underwater magnetic fields which interfere with the scents sharks use for hunting, or increasing the use of of smaller mesh nets which create a barrier without entangling marine life.

M

The problem that in South Africa we only using lethal methods and that is outdated and unsustainable.

D

If you believe that it's these two orcas which have driven away the great white population, there's not much humans can do about that. What your argument is, there's actually a lot humans can do with long line fishing and getting rid of these shark nets. That is something humans can impact.

I

Absolutely. Let's stop bickering about something we can't control and let's start focusing on the things that we can control. And if we don't start addressing those factors that we can control, I don't believe there's any hope.

D

In 1991, South Africa was the first country in the world to protect the great white shark. But Enrico Gennari believes those efforts have failed and now fears it may be the first country to lose them.

M

If we lose the white shark in South Africa, we lose a battle for all nature. If we can protect even the most charismatic, most protected species on paper in South Africa, what chance the little guys, the other sharks or the other animals have against unsustainable use? Nothing.

D

There's a lot of people watching who may not have a lot of sympathy with great white sharks. Why should somebody care?

I

I think somebody should care in the same way as we never used to have sympathy with whales. You know, we are wiping these animals out to the point of extinction. Great whites are no different. So even if we don't like the look of the animal, they're incredibly important for us to going forward

B

with no

D

great whites to document. Fallows has shifted his focus to photographing humpback whales.

I

Unbelievable.

D

Since a moratorium on commercial whaling was enacted in the 1980s, humpbacks have made a remarkable comeback. Does it have anything to do with the great whites leaving?

I

No. What it's got 100% to do with is enlightened governments, passionate individuals showcasing the whales for what they were. Incredibly sentient creatures having an important role to play in our ocean. Therefore, they became protected and now their numbers are being allowed to expand naturally.

D

To you, that's an example that conservation efforts can work.

I

Undoubtedly. It can work. I believe, you know, if we take away pressures on animals, if there are enough of them, they will still rebound. It's called balance. A balanced ocean is a healthy ocean. A healthy ocean is a healthy environment for us.

A

Explore wildlife photographer Chris Fallow's archive.

I

I was very lucky to be in the right position at the right time.

A

@60minutesovertime.com

F

they're completely cut off from the outside world.

A

A new Paramount documentary that the narrative is we are a cult.

L

No.

C

I'm doing this out of my own free will.

A

Gives unprecedented access to Gloria Vale, the controversial closed society in New Zealand.

I

38 charges of sexually offending children.

A

Wrong things have occurred. They do not define who we are. Can't you just accept the fact that I love my life?

I

I need to destroy them.

A

Devotion, obedience or betrayal. Now streaming on Paramount plus.