One woman's struggle to survive and to tell the stories of those who didn't

She enjoys an active social life, has a mischievous sense of humour and a rapier-like memory, which no doubt served her well while studying the theology degree she completed at the sprightly age of 79.

But the sparkle in her eyes not only belies her age but another, darker truth. Iby is a Holocaust survivor. As a young woman she was imprisoned and tortured by security police in Hungary, endured the horrors of Auschwitz and worked as a nurse at a Nazi slave labour camp. It is a harrowing story and one that Iby, who has lived in Leeds since 1964, couldn't bring herself to talk about for more than 50 years. When her husband, Bert, died in 1984 she started writing about her childhood, but found it raked up too many painful memories.

"When you bury part of your past away, you don't only put the bad parts away you also put away the good parts, because you bury a whole segment of time," she says.

It wasn't until she was studying for her MA at Leeds University that she felt the urge to write about her past. "It was an exceedingly slow and painful process. It was like Pandora's box, I had buried it and I didn't really want to open it. But something was pushing me to do it."

Iby wrote the book over a two- year period and, having finished it, put it away.

"I had no intention of doing anything with it because I felt it was a private thing."

Despite having written about her wartime experiences, it is only in the last couple of years that she has been able to talk publicly about her memories. "My children think it is what I should be doing and if you look at what has happened in the last 50 years in Rwanda, Darfur and Kosovo, it seems, as Hegel said, do people ever learn from history?

"But we need to make young people aware of the dangers of dehumanising people either by race, colour, religion, or culture. Because if you dehumanise someone you no longer feel that you have to treat them like a human."

This year she was filmed for the BBC's My Story series, which recounts the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, and in October her book, The Woman Without a Number, was finally published.

Iby's book comes at a critical time for Auschwitz. The buildings are crumbling and, with experts estimating the repair bill at 120m, its future as a stark memorial to man's inhumanity to man remains uncertain. However, it's the stories of people like Iby which are the most persuasive argument for preserving the site for future generations.

Born into a comfortable middle- class family in Bratislava. Her mother was Slovak and her father a Hungarian army officer. She was sent to a German grammar school, but by the time she was 14 she was forced to leave because of her family's Jewish roots. "To be suddenly told that you are different made me exceedingly angry and I still feel angry about it because under the skin we are all the same, yet all of a sudden I was being treated differently and I couldn't see why."

After war broke out, life became increasingly precarious, with Jewish girls routinely rounded up and taken to work as prostitutes for German soldiers. In February, 1942, Iby was smuggled across the border into Hungary where she ended up working for a solicitor, a family friend working with the Hungarian resistance.

"One day somebody blabbed and we were arrested," Iby says. "We were interrogated by the police extremely unpleasantly and I was kept in prison for three months." She was eventually released, only to be re-arrested and sent to a refugee camp in northern Hungary.

While there she discovered that her parents and brother had escaped to a refugee camp in Budapest. By now she was engaged to a Hungarian man and, once married, she and her family would be allowed to stay.

However, in March 1944, the Germans occupied the country and one day Iby was picked up the police. "I didn't have my papers with me so there was no way I could prove who I was," she says. "It was June 6 – D-Day – and on June 12, the day I was supposed to get married, I was taken by cattle wagon to Auschwitz – not a very good start to my wedding day."

Iby arrived with a small group of doctors and nurses she had met while working in a Budapest infirmary. "The only way to survive was to stick together. If you were on your own you were vulnerable. If you coughed, you sneezed or you stumbled, you were taken to the gas chamber." She writes about Auschwitz in her book but still struggles to talk about the atrocities she witnessed.

"I find certain parts difficult to talk about because if I do then I won't sleep tonight. People ask me if I would go back there and I say under no circumstances. I spent months there; I don't need to go back."

She spent nearly two, terrifying months at Auschwitz before she was sent to work in a hospital at a labour camp in eastern Germany by the infamous Josef Mengele, the SS doctor dubbed the "Angel of Death" for his gruesome human experiments. "On one occasion Dr Mengele asked for volunteers, doctors and nurses, to go with the slave labour to Lippstadt. We didn't know what would happen to us but when you face the possibility of being sent to the gas chamber every day it seemed a risk worth taking."

Iby was taken to another part of the camp where they were allowed to wash, given some soup and new underwear. Although not everyone was so fortunate.

"The day before we left a girl I knew said that she had seen her parents being taken into the gas chamber. She and her and twin sister were being experimented on and they knew they were not going to survive.

"She said, would I promise to tell their story – it took a long time to do so, but I did eventually."

In March 1945, with Nazi Germany facing the endgame, work stopped at the neighbouring factory and the hospital and camp were evacuated.

Women with babies, along with the elderly, were herded on to wagons bound for Bergen-Belsen while the rest were forced to walk.

However, Iby had taken a crack on her hip from a rifle butt in Auschwitz and struggled to walk. "If somebody couldn't keep up, a soldier would stay behind and you would hear a shot and the soldier came back and the other person didn't. If it wasn't for my friends who supported me in the middle of the column that is what would have happened to me."

After walking for four days they were exhausted, but salvation was at hand. "The following morning we heard church bells coming from a village and white sheets hanging from the windows."

The Allied soldiers had caught up with them and their German guards were captured.

Iby spent several weeks in hospital before being released.

"I didn't want to go back to the camp and I didn't want to go back home, because I didn't think anybody would have survived and I couldn't face the idea of living there as a stranger."

She discovered that her father was dead but her mother and brother had survived, and returned to Bratislava. By this time she had started working as a translator for the British Control Commission in Germany. It was there that she met Bert Knill, a British Army officer. They were married in December 1946 and moved to England the following year where they began a new life.

But that, as Iby says, is another story.

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