I arrived in Auschwitz on 1 October 1944. I was about three months pregnant, so it didn't show, and I was put by Mengele among the strong people who could work_ My son George's death from pneumonia, aged two months, in April 1944 saved my life, because if I had arrived with a baby I would have been sent straight to the gas chambers.

My husband was sent to Auschwitz three days before me and I never saw him again. After the war somebody told me point-blank: "Don't wait for him, he was shot in front of me, for no good reason [on 18 January 1945]."

The worst thing was the roll calls which lasted endlessly, and I fainted quite a few times, which was the worst thing you could do. But I had good friends who picked me up, because if I had been lying on the floor there was only one outcome. I remember the shouting and the dogs barking, and screaming and screaming and screaming. I stayed in Auschwitz only 10 days, which were like 100 years, because we kept on being "selected", running around naked for the SS.

One day we were sent on cattle wagons to work in a munitions factory near Dresden. In April we were evacuated in coal wagons because the Americans were getting near. Apart from being dirty and sooty, I was in the ninth month of pregnancy and weighed five stone_ When I saw the Mauthausen camp in Austria I started having birth pangs. They put me on an open cart with other women dying of typhoid. Hundreds of thousands of lice were crawling around, and I was sitting there trying to have the baby.

I had to leave this cart and climb on another which took us to the prison hospital. An SS officer saw I was giving birth and said: "You may scream, if you want." Until today I am not sure if it was meant ironically or not. My baby arrived and didn't move and didn't cry. Eva was so small, about 3lb, and had to be wrapped in newspaper in the bitter cold. After three days, the Americans liberated us. They put us on the train and we arrived in Prague and everything was dark and it was the worst moment of the whole war: you thought you were going home but that wasn't a home. I knew my parents weren't here, my sisters weren't here. You stood on that station expecting heaven and there was just nothing.'