THE horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were brought first hand to school pupils when two former victims shared their miraculous Holocaust survival stories.

Rudi Oppenheimer and Eva Clarke told their harrowing family histories to youngsters studying the subject at two County Durham schools.

Speaking at Greenfield School Community and Arts College, in Newton Aycliffe, Mr Oppenheimer recalled how his family was rounded up in June 1943 and sent to Bergen-Belsen, in Germany.

While Mr Oppenheimer and his brother and sister survived, both their parents perished in the dire conditions which claimed the lives of about 50,000 people.

When he was 12, soldiers from the Durham Light Infantry took part in the liberation of the camp on April 15, 1945.

Inside they found 60,000 desperately-ill prisoners and 13,000 unburied corpses.

In the talk, organised by the Holocaust Education Trust (Het), he told of his wartime experiences and his fears for the present day.

He said: "I think we haven't learnt anything at all from that time.

"That is why I give my talk to you, maybe one day when you grow up, you can make things better."

Pupils at Ferryhill Business and Enterprise College met Ms Clarke, who was born in Maut-hausen Concentration Camp, in Austria, in 1945, only days before it was liberated.

She and her mother were the only survivors from their family, 15 members of whom were killed in Auschwitz.

For three years, Ms Clarke's parents survived in the Theresienstadt ghetto, near Prague, stealing vegetable scraps despite the threat of a Nazi whip and losing their first baby, Dan, to pneumonia.

Towards the end of the war, as the German forces retreated, Ms Clarke's heavily pregnant mother, Anna Bergman, was forced onto a train for a nightmare journey.

Ms Clarke said: "My mother describes herself as being a barely living, pregnant skeleton."

After three weeks in a cramped, filthy coal drum exposed to the elements with no food and little water, the shock of arriving at the notorious Mauthausen camp sent her into Labour.

Ms Clarke said: "A Nazi officer saw her suffering and told her 'you'll have to carry on screaming'.

"She had to give birth to me in horrific conditions and I only weighed about 3lb.

"Today such a small baby would go straight to an incubator, but I had the best incubator because my mother just held and held me."

Three days after her birth the camp was liberated.

Sadly, her father had been deported to Auschwitz where he was shot less than a week before its liberation. He never knew his wife was pregnant with Eva.

Only five years ago, when they returned to Mauthausen for a memorial service, they discovered how close they came to death.

The day before they arrived at Mauthausen the gas chamber, for which they may have been destined, was blown up.

Ms Clarke said: "I tell the story for reasons of commemoration, to remember all those millions of people who never ever had one single person to remember them because their families and communities were killed.

"And to try to enable us all to learn the lessons of the Holocaust, to try to counteract in a small way racism, any form of racism.

"What happened to my family happened only because they were Jewish.