When liberation came, it came quickly. One night in January 1945, as ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister Miriam lay in their bunks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were suddenly awoken by a huge explosion.

Outside, the winter sky was red with flames. 

The Nazis had blown up the crematoria where the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Jews had been burned, for fear that the approaching Soviet Army would discover them.

 
Auschwitz

Facing the unknown: Children liberated from Auschwitz in 1945

Moments later, Eva and Miriam were forced by guards out of their barracks with all the other young twins in Birkenau and marched by the SS down the road to the main camp at Auschwitz, one-and-a-half miles away.

It was a miracle that any of them were alive, for all had been subject to Dr Mengele's evil medical experiments in 'hereditary biology'.

In one experiment, Eva had been injected with a disease that Mengele wanted to study. She had become extremely ill - but kept telling herself she must survive.

'If I had died, my twin sister Miriam would have been killed with an injection to the heart and then Mengele would have done the comparative autopsies,' she explained later.