JOANNA Millan’s first memory was leaving a Nazi concentration camp.

She was three years old. “Leaving was frightening – while you were in the camp you were relatively safe, but no-one who left came back,” she says. “The planes we had to board were bombers so you can imagine how scary it was. No-one told us we had been liberated.”

Joanna, who for a time lived in Shipley, was born Bela Rosenthal in August 1942, in Berlin. At the beginning of March the following year her father was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and killed on arrival.

Later that year, Bela and her mother were taken from their home and sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp 50 miles from Prague.

Theresienstadt served as a transit camp for German, Austrian and Czech Jews who could then be deported by the SS to killing centres or forced-labour camps.

With up to 50,000 Jews present at one time, seven times more than the camp was designed for, conditions were filthy and cramped. Surviving on a meagre diet of watery soup, potatoes and bread, one in four died. Every day, 190 bodies were cremated in four ovens, each designed for one, but fitting four emaciated corpses.

In 1944, when she was 18 months old, Bela’s mother died of TB.

Now an orphan, Bela became one of a group of three boys and three girls of similar age who were left to look after themselves.

Her story is as heart-rending as it is remarkable, and this month, 70 years after the liberation of the brutal camp, she is speaking at an event in Bradford as part of Bradford Literature Festival.

“We kept together and had each other,” she says. “Adults did not feature in our lives. There were regular deportations, so they were constantly changing.”

Some of the women working in the kitchens and vegetable patch would smuggle food to the orphans.

When the camp was liberated in 1945, the oldest of Bela’s group was just three. They were flown to Britain along with 300 other surviving orphans. After living in two children’s homes with other survivors, she was adopted by a childless Jewish couple from London.

Renamed Joanna, she was told to forget her past. Her adoptive parents pretended that she was their natural daughter and forbade her to contact the other children.

“They rejected my past,” says Joanna, now 73 and a grandmother. “I knew little apart from my name and birthplace.”

Thirty years ago Joanna was contacted by American academic Sarah Moskovitz who had read a study by child psychoanalyst Anna Freud of Joanna and the other young survivors of Theresienstadt. Both she and Joanna’s husband, who studied at the University of Bradford, pushed into discovering her past.

She has now unearthed much of her family’s history, and traced the orphans who lived with her in the camp. One had died, one was in a mental institution and she keeps in touch with the others. “As far as I’m concerned we were like brothers and sisters. We were emotionally close,” she says.

Meticulous records of those who were killed and those who were ill are now in the camp’s museum. “I found my name, along with my mum and grandmother, who was taken to Auschwitz and killed on arrival,” says Joanna.

“In the camp I was ill much of the time. I had scarlet fever, hepatitis and serious kidney disease. It was all recorded by doctors.”

She adds: “There was no medicine or equipment in the camp. You either got better or died. I am tough, both physically and mentally, and didn’t need a lot of food.”

Joanna now gives talks in schools across the UK, and in China, where there is a growing interest in Judaism.

Joanna was invited to speak by University of Bradford pharmacy student Orianne Brown, who for the past three years has been an ambassador of the Holocaust Educational Trust, and in 2013 became a regional ambassador.

Orianne would like to thank the literature festival and University of Bradford Union for their support in making the talk possible.

“It is vital that we do not forget that a civilised society like our own was able to commit such atrocious crimes against men, women and children, for no other reason than the community they belonged to.”

The free event will be taking place in John Stanley Bell Lecture Theatre in the Richmond building at the University of Bradford on Thursday, May 21, from 7pm to 8.30pm. Tickets can be booked at bradfordliteraturefestival.co.uk/events/holocaust-memorial-event.

Also visit het.org.uk