A Holocaust survivor has said the horrors of Nazi tyranny are still etched into her mind as the world marks 77 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Renee Salt BEM narrowly survived Adolf Hitler’s occupation of Europe which took place when she was a small girl living with her family in Poland.

The 93-year-old can still recall the ‘screaming and bellowing’ of the Nazi guards as she arrived at Auschwitz, the last time she ever saw her dad.

One of a precious few who are left to give personal testimony of the genocide, which claimed the lives of six million Jewish men, women and children, she will mark Holocaust Memorial Day by lighting a candle at her home in London.

Born Rywka Ruchla Berkowitz, her comfortable family life in the town of Zduńska Wola was destroyed in a wave of death that would also claim the lives of her mum and younger sister.

After the Nazis invaded in 1939, Renee and her family were forced out of their flat when German officers took a liking to it and left trying to survive the abject misery of the ghettos.

Aged 10, she was sent by her family to live with her grandparents in Kalisz, central Poland, but the Nazis decided to make the city Judenrein, or ‘free of Jews’, and her mum, Sala, managed to relocate her back to her home town.

Renee and her family lived eight to a room in Zduńska, by now a ghetto where shootings and beatings were regularly carried out by the Nazis.

At one point, gallows were built in the centre of the town, with 10 Jewish men’s bodies left on display for days on end.

The Nazis then made everyone in the town assemble, shouting ‘all Jews outside’, and ordering parents to hand over children under the age of 18.

Her mum tried to hide her and her sister, Stenia, under a coat but her sibling was discovered and taken away with the other children.

Renee and her parents ended up in the Lodz ghetto and found work in factories, where overcrowding, sickness and starvation were rife.

They were then taken in suffocating cattle trucks to Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp, where more than 1.1 million people lost their lives.

‘When we arrived at Auschwitz we heard the screaming and belowing, “get off the train, be quick, get a move on”,’ Renee said.

‘My father jumped off first and I jumped off after him. After I jumped off I didn’t see him any more. He disappeared into thin air. He was a young man, only about 42 years old. I never saw him again. Men were separated from women and the guards moved in, shoving us into columns.

‘Some of them whispered to us that this was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the place where people are being taken straight into the gas chambers.

‘All around us was electrified, illuminated fencing and high watch towers. It was so terribly frightening.

‘We were lined up inside and at the head of the queue the selection process was being conducted by the infamous Dr Josef Mengele, the butcher of Auschwitz. When he saw people holding hands he would deliberately split them up, one to the right, one to the left.’

Elderly people, invalids, pregnant women and those who looked unfit for work were sent to the right, to go straight to the gas chambers, while Renee and her mother were taken to the left.

The young girl and her mum were later transported to Hamburg in Germany, where Renee was forced into slave labour, picking up rubble from blocks of flats bombed by the Allies.

‘We had to wake up every day in the early hours of morning to go to work,’ she said. ‘We had to go to the wash rooms and the water was ice cold, we didn’t have any towels to dry ourselves or any soap and we had to go straight outside for roll call. Many times when there was a big frost my pyjama jacket, which was all I had, used to freeze to my body.

‘We had to put whole bricks in one lorry and broken bricks in another lorry. I couldn’t feel my feet, they were frozen cold, life was very, very difficult.’

Renee and her mum, by now so weak she was barely alive, were then moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany a month before it was liberated on April 15, 1945.

Sala died in hospital 12 days after the British Army arrived, aged 42.

Renee would emerge from the war as one of only three children from her home town to survive, with all the others, including her little sister, dying at the hands of the Nazis.

The survivor’s future husband, a British military policeman named Charles, was among the liberators at Bergen-Belsen. They would meet by chance a few years later in Paris before marrying in 1949 and having two children.

Charles passed away 11 years ago and is also survived by the couple’s four grandchildren and great-grandchild.

Renee now speaks in public forums and is among Holocaust survivors who work with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) charity to serve a reminder of the lessons from the darkest period of Europe’s modern history.

As she joins thousands for today’s commemoration by lighting a candle and remembers the family she lost, the memories are still seared into her mind.

‘It is in front of my eyes all the time,’ Renee said.

‘I will never forget it, I live with it every day. For 50 years we kept quiet, we didn’t speak at all about it, but now I want people everywhere to know what happened. There are people who don’t believe it ever happened and we want the world to avoid another Holocaust.

‘That’s why we speak in schools and universities, it’s not easy, it’s very, very difficult, but we do it because we have to.’

Reflecting on her miraculous survival, a combination of luck and her family’s protection, Renee added: ‘Hitler didn’t reckon on me being around.’

This year’s commemoration falls as the clouds of war gather over eastern Europe once again, with Russian troops massed on the border with Ukraine.

‘I am very worried because it starts small and then that it could happen that it turns into a world war,’ Renee said. ‘There have been a few times when I’ve been frightened that a war could have broken out, and thank God that it hasn’t happened. But now we don’t know what’s going to happen.’

Holocaust Memorial Day falls each year on January 27, the day when Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, and is also intended to remember the victims of more recent genocides.

HET Chief Executive Karen Pollock CBE said: ‘Today we mark Holocaust Memorial Day, the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the former Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

‘We remember the six million Jewish men, women and children who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, and we pay tribute to those who survived.

‘As the Holocaust moves further into history, it is incumbent on all of us to grapple with the truth of the past, to hear the stories of the survivors, and to pledge to never be silent in the face of the anti-Semitism and hatred that allowed the Holocaust to happen.’

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