Eva Clarke will take the horrors of the Holocaust to the grave. Her skeletal mother – weighing just 5st – gave birth to her slumped on top of a filthy coal cart at the gates of the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945. She weighed just 3lbs. Fifteen of her family were slaughtered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau including her father, who was shot one week before the death camp was liberated. Yet despite the lifelong pain she has carried as a victim and survivor of humanity’s most atrocious act, Eva, 80, still believes that only by standing up to hate and prejudice wherever it exists can we ever hope to create a better world.

And today she continues a commitment to relentlessly preaching the values of remembrance and tolerance, in spite of an alarming rise in anti-Semitism. She said: “What is happening around the world, and in this country, is extremely worrying. The only answer can be education – to try and educate, especially young people, to stand up against racism and prejudice. But that’s what we have been saying for years.

“We only hear the bad news. We don’t tend to praise sufficiently all the wonderful work that has been done – and continues to be done – by various charitable organisations and there are so many amazing young people doing their best in very difficult circumstances to try and to try and counter all this prejudice. This is what we need to do.”

Born to Czech-Jewish mother Anka Bergman and Bernd Nathan, a German-Jewish architect, Eva is one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, the Nazi’s meticulous programme of state-sponsored genocide in which six million Jews were slaughtered.

In September 1944 her father was transported to Auschwitz, the death camp in Poland, but did not know his wife – who volunteered to follow him – was pregnant.

The couple lost their first child Dan, born in 1944, to pneumonia while in the Theresienstadt ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic. He was just two months old.

When Anka stepped through the gates of hell at Auschwitz she was met by “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, the Nazi SS doctor, who demanded to know if she was carrying a child. Had she told the truth she would have been sent to the gas chamber.

But as her pregnancy was not visible, and she was deemed fit, Anka was sent to a slave labour camp near Dresden before a three-week train journey to Mauthausen in Austria.

She was so shocked when she saw the name of the death camp that she immediately went into labour.

Eva was born on April 29, 1945, a day after the Nazis had run out of gas to feed their killing chambers, and just days before American troops liberated it.

After the war mother and daughter returned to Prague where Anka remarried in 1948. The same year they emigrated to the UK and settled in Cardiff.

Eva married Malcom Clarke, later a Professor of Law at Cambridge University, and the couple had two sons.

On Holocaust Memorial Day Eva will stand alongside fellow survivors to honour the memories of the Jewish men, women and children who were systematically slaughtered as part of what was chillingly called the Final Solution, and the millions more who perished under Nazi persecution.

Her birth certificate, which hangs in the Holocaust Galleries of the Imperial War Museum in London, is testament to life amid genocide and remains an enduring example of hope in adversity.

It inspires Eva to continue to talk about the Holocaust and how the world must keep its promise in reaffirming “never again”.

In the 2019 New Year Honours Eva was awarded the British Empire Medal for her work in which she shares her experiences through the Holocaust Educational Trust.

It is a commitment she has vowed to continue in memory of her mother, and her father, grandparents, uncles, aunts and seven-year-old cousin, Peter, who all perished inside the Auschwitz warehouse of death.

She said: “My mother always said she was screaming, not only because she was in labour, but because she thought this was her very last minute on earth.

“The only thing I feel that I can do is to tell my mother’s story. Nobody can identify with six million Jews, but everybody can identify with one or two families, because then it becomes personal.

“I remember my mother saying one time, ‘You know, there’s not always going to be a call for your talks’. And I said, ‘Mummy, I think that racism and prejudice and antisemitism is never going to go away. I don’t feel it’s a heavy burden. I feel it’s my duty, and I’m very glad to be able to do it’.”

Anka died in 2013 and her husband in 2024.

Eva’s remarkable dedication to peace and understanding comes as anti-Jewish hatred in Britain now stands at the highest level on record with polling showing the number of people holding what it is considered to be entrenched anti-Semitic views covering more than one fifth of the population.

Some 45% – almost half of the population – believes Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews, almost half 18-24-year-olds are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel, while only 18% are comfortable. Only 31% of young people agree Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people and 20% of them say that it does not.

Disturbingly 10% of young people have a favourable view of Hamas – and 14% of them believe it is wrong to class the proscribed organisation as terrorists – while almost one fifth believe the murder spree on October 7, 2023 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more snatched as hostages, sparking a fresh wave of global anti-Semitism, was justified.

Almost exactly two years later on Yom Kippur – the holiest day of the year for the Jewish community – Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed in an antisemitic terror attack at the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester.

And on December 14 in Australia, 11 men, three women and a 10-year-old girl were slaughtered in an Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack on Bondi Beach during a celebration for the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.