Taking centre stage was Dr Otto Jakubovic, who escaped the horrors of Auschwitz to make a new life in Sheffield.

Dr Jakubovic, who was interned in the notorious camp in 1944, joined Steve Mendelsson, also from Sheffield, and Hanneke Dye as guests of honour at the event organised by the university's multifaith chaplaincy.

Dr Jakubovic told how he was sent from his home in Czechoslovakia to the Theriesenstadt ghetto before being transferred in a cattle truck to Auschwitz in May 1944, aged 15.

Telling the SS guards that he was 18 and a professional gardener ensured he was sent to the labour camp rather than the gas chambers.

He recalled that arriving at Auschwitz was like being 'on the edges of hell'. "Our heads were shaved and we had a number tattooed on our arms. This was the moment when the dehumanisation started - when we stopped being people and simply became another number."

A month after D-Day in July 1944, Dr Jakubovic was moved to a work camp where he remained for several months.

But as the Russians advanced into Germany the inmates were moved in what became known as a 'death march'. Three-quarters of the men died on the four week journey before the survivors were found by the Russian army and the Red Cross.

"We knew that any moment could be the end. In many ways, though, I was lucky. Lucky that I had overheard something of the camps and thought to lie about my age.

"Lucky that after D-Day the Germans needed prisoners as labour to replace men sent to join the army, and lucky that I came out of Auschwitz because most people who went there never made it beyond the extermination camp."

Immediately after the war Dr Jakubovic came to the UK, earning a PhD and becoming a scientist working in research and development. He arrived in Sheffield in 1970 and is married with three children and eight grandchildren.

Steve Mendelsson, born in Breslau, Germany, was sent with his younger brother to England under the kindertransport programme - a scheme intended to help youngsters flee Nazi persecution in Europe.

Staying in England after the war, Steve moved to Sheffield in 1968 as consultant to Park Gate Iron and Steel Co, eventually becoming a lecturer at the University of Sheffield.

Hanneke Dye moved to the UK from Holland aged 22. She was born in 1943 while her family was in hiding from the Nazis, and was smuggled out of the house in a vacuum cleaner box on the back of a bicycle.

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