How do you repay someone who not only saved your life, but put theirs in danger in the process? Where do you start when your saviour’s act of bravery took place almost eight decades ago, and when you don’t even know their name?

“They just called him Edek. Nobody knew his surname,” says Janine Webber, sitting on the sofa in her immaculate living room in Enfield, north London.

The Polish-born Jewish grandmother is still relishing life at 86, due to the heroism of a man she has never been able to thank - a fact that today, on Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day, she feels more keenly than ever.

Webber was born in July 1932 in Lvov, now in western Ukraine. “That sounds a little like the English word ‘love’, doesn’t it?” she says. “Well, there was very little love shown towards our family.”

The Nazis invaded in 1941, when Webber was nine. Her parents dug a hole underneath their wardrobe in which to hide. It was not enough - during a Gestapo raid, her father, Alfred, was shot dead, and her grandmother thrown down the stairs and dragged away to a fate unknown. Webber and her mother, Lipka, were moved to the ghetto; hiding in a dog kennel, then a rat-infested cellar. It was there that Lipka died of typhus, aged just 29. Webber was an orphan before her tenth birthday.