A SURVIVOR of Auschwitz says the horrors of the Nazi death camps must never be forgotten.

Frank Bright lit one of 70 candles commissioned by the UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust at the University of Essex.

Seventy years earlier he was a 16-year-old boy transported from a Jewish ghetto in Czechoslovakia to the notorious concentration camp with his mother in October 1944.

“Most people travelled in cattle trucks but we were in a third-class carriage,” said Frank, now 86.

“We travelled at night so we couldn’t see anything. Then all of a sudden there was a barbed wire fence which seemed to extend into infinity.

“Someone said: ‘That’s a concentration camp.’ “He knew because he’d been taken to a concentration camp during the Kristallnacht.

“The train stopped and we got out. For the first time we saw prisoners in the striped prison clothing and women SS officers.”

The teenager was separated from his mother.

“We were put into groups five or six abreast, with men on one side and women and children on the other,” he said.

“My mother spotted me at the front of the line. She came over and shook me by the hand and went back to her place and that is the last I saw of her.”

For more on this story, see tomorrow's Gazette.