Trude Levi

Speaking in Canterbury to mark the opening of a Holocaust exhibition Trude Levi tells her tale of a monumental year in her life and how she survived Auschwitz.

Trude grew up in the Hungarian provinces, near to the Austrian border. In 1944 was working in Budapest as a nursery school teacher.

In March the Germans arrived in Budapest, and Adolph Eichmann was put in charge of arranging the deportation of the city's Jews. Trude had the choice of going into hiding and risk being found, or returning home. Her Christian friends offered to hide her, but in April 1944, and to celebrate her 20th birthday, Trude headed to her family home.

It was the start of a year that would test her resilience to the limit.

Watch - Trude's reception when she got off the train

Her mother was a language teacher from Vienna and her father, a gynaecologist, was known as the "Doctor of the Poor" as he didn't charge his poorer patients. They lived in a small flat, and any money the family did have went on books, music and medical equipment.

Listen - A broken family

Trude and her mother were taken into the "ghetto" which consisted of two streets surrounded by barbed wire. There wasn't much to eat here. They were in a very small room with four other women, but felt lucky as many rooms housed 16 or 17 men, women and children, often strangers and all thrown together.

Listen - The journey to the first concentration camp

The first concentration camp was in a disused, incredibly polluted and dirty machine factory and they slept on the ground. It was a very hot summer so they didn't mind sleeping outside.

In the camp they asked for 50 volunteers and she felt an unexplained compulsion to join the group. She did something she wasn't very proud of.

Watch - The onward journey

The journey to Auschwitz >>