'That Anyone Survived Auschwitz Is a Miracle. Yet I Am Here'; as a Teenage Girl, Lily Ebert Endured Unimaginable Horrors in the Notorious Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Here, She Tells Louette Harding about the Traumas She Can Never Forget - and of Her Incredible Struggle for Survival Main Photographs DEBRA HURFORD BROWN

Lily Ebert was never meant to make 82 years. In the summer of 1944, aged 14, she was taken to Auschwitz, fodder for the Nazis' grisly 'Final Solution'. Today, telling her story at her flat in the comfortable London suburb of Golders Green, she is frail but straight-backed. Behind her shoulder, a cabinet of dolls in national costume - a miniature crowd of different races and creeds - smile in harmony.

There's a hint in her collection of a childhood that was lost. The eldest daughter in a close family of six children, Lily's early memories are of togetherness: 'Jewish Friday nights with the family, visiting friends.' Even when war broke out, Lily was so protected from its shadow by her mother and businessman father that it hardly touched her as she grew up in Bonyhad in southern Hungary. The Hungarian government joined the Axis powers in 1940 and sent troops to fight alongside the Germans and Italians in Russia, but by spring 1944, sensing defeat, it was eager to change sides. Hitler sent in his troops. 'It was a shock. The world knew and the Germans knew that the war was lost for Germany.' She says that 'luckily' her father had died in 1942 and that 'he is buried in Hungary' - a reminder that other members of Lily's family died unnaturally and lack graves. At the time, though, they reasoned, 'We will have difficult times but we will survive.' Restrictions for Jews were introduced overnight.

'Every day there was something new. First was the yellow star - everybody had to wear one.' They were moved to a ghetto. 'We lived in a big house in the nicest part of town and they put us in the poorest part, each family crammed into one room. Then you had to give up the radio, telephones, jewellery.' Lily's elder brother, Imre, concealed two of their mother's rings in the heel of a shoe. He …