AN Auschwitz survivor has lived to see the woman who saved her life posthumously honoured.

Maria Kotarba repeatedly shielded Lena Lakomy, then aged 23, from the worst of the evils of the notorious death camp.

Although Lena's husband was murdered by the SS, she survived thanks to Maria, who was a member of the Polish resistance.

Maria nursed a typhus-wracked Lena back from the brink of death by smuggling vegetables and surreptitiously cooking her soup. She also managed to make sure Lena was given only light duties around the camp.

Amazingly, she saved Lena's life again in another concentration camp.

Maria stumbled across Lena lying close to death in the snow, after the SS -retreating from the advancing Red Army -herded the survivors of Auschwitz into Ravensbruck concentration camp.

The two became so close that Lena even began calling Maria mother because of the bond between them.

After the war, Lena moved to the North-East to rebuild her life.

She moved to Middlesbrough, but never forgot the bravery of the woman who risked her life to save hers.

Lena has long campaigned for Maria's heroism to be recognised.

And after decades of trying, her death camp saviour has finally been awarded Israel's highest honour.

Maria has officially been added to the list of the "Righteous among the Nations" by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority in Jerusalem.

Her name has now been engraved on the commemorative wall around Jerusalem's Garden of the Righteous.

Lena, who now lives in London, said: "I have waited so many years for this. It is the least I can do for Maria - someone who treated me as a mother might treat her only child. I even called her mother out of gratitude, she never objected to that name. She was a truly incredible individual, her actions were unbelievable."

Now, a widow for the second time, Lena said of her time on Teesside: "Everyone welcomed us with such kindness, we had the same ration books as everyone else; we all queued up at the Co-op together. I made many friends in Middlesbrough and I still see them today.'"

Maria joined the Polish resistance after the Nazis invaded her country, and was working as a courier, taking messages and supplies at night between the partisan groups, when a traitor betrayed her.

She had witnessed the extermination of her local Jewish neighbours and vowed to save any Jew she could. She was sent to Auschwitz extermination camp as a political prisoner in January 1943. With the help of an appeal broadcast on Polish television, Lena learned that Maria had died of cancer in the 1950s.

In April 1997, Lena was able to visit Maria's grave in the hills of southern Poland and pay her respects. And Maria's family heard from Lena for the first time of Maria's heroism.

Lena's story is being written by author James Foucar, of London, after a chance meeting on a public bench while both waited for an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum to open.

No date for publication has been set.

Holocaust Memorial Day will be marked with a vigil, procession and meeting in York on Thursday. The events will begin at Clifford's Tower at 6pm with a candlelight vigil. At 6.30pm, people will walk by torchlight to a meeting at York University, where speakers from faith groups and anti-racism groups will discuss the lessons of the Holocaust.