At just three years of age, Bela Rosenthal had survived the Holocaust.

While Bela, now 65, was too young to remember much of what happened to her, she has pieced together enough to know that she was one of the lucky ones.

Orphaned and kept alive on vegetable scraps stolen from a Nazi garden, Bela says she prefers not being able to recall the horrors she once lived through.

"Fortunately, I don't have any memories of my time in the concentration camp," she said.

"It's hard to remember when you're a child because every day is the same.

"There were no highlights. Nothing to remember.

"A lot of the older children have tried to block it out."

On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations on Saturday, Bela shared her story in Grays at a free educational evening organised by Thurrock Council last night.

She spoke of how her father, Siegfried Rosenthal, was murdered on March 4, 1943, before she had even reached her first birthday.

He was killed at the hands of the Nazis at the now notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, in Poland, where it is estimated that up to 1.6 million people lost their lives.

Ninety per cent of those killed are believed to have been Jews.

Bela's story of survival, however, began when she and her mother, Else (nee Schallmach), were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, located in what is now the Czech Republic.

Nazi propaganda presented the camp as a model Jewish settlement, but in reality it was a ghetto where disease and starvation were rife and where tens of thousands of people were sent away and never heard of again.

Bela's mother was just one of thousands who succumbed to disease, dying of tuberculosis on May 31, 1944.

"I was in a house with five other orphans then. We just survived supporting each other."

Bela said a woman, who farmed vegetables meant for the Nazis, had kept her alive with stolen scraps.

"The rations were very very limited.

"The meat was so contaminated, it was safer to eat vegetables."

She said being an orphan may have been the only thing that saved her from the gas chamber.

"Being orphans, we had no one to take us to the gas chambers.

"The Nazis liked everything to be ordered and organised, so if you didn't have an adult to take you, you were more likely to be left behind."

Then after about two years in the camp, Bela was saved.

She was whisked away to England by people she described as "unknown heroes".

While she doesn't remember how she escaped, she does remember a "traumatic flight".

She was later adopted and now lives in London.

Bela said she considers herself English, despite being born in Germany.

"I belong here now."

Bela said she had embarked on a 20-year quest to find out what happened to the rest of her family and had so far tracked down just a handful of relatives who had survived.

She also discovered her father had married and had a family with a Russian woman, before he met her mother, and she still longs to find her possible half-siblings.

Despite everything that has happened, Bela says she has made a good life for herself.

She has three children and eight grandchildren, although she was widowed five years ago.

Bela says she has moved on, but she admits being a Holocaust survivor does come with a price.

She said she felt compelled to share her story and make people aware of genocide, so that one day people would act to stop it.

Bela travels the country delivering up to 30 talks a year on her experience in the hope that she may help save others.

"It's also a responsibility being a survivor.

"We don't want to confine it to the pages of history. Not for a while yet, anyway.

"We want to keep it in the forefront of people's minds."