The Times and Independent Series have teamed up with Jewish Care's Holocaust Survivors Centre in Hendon to tell the stories of those who saw first-hand the atrocities of the Second World War.

Here is Sabina Miller's story.

Despite the holocaust tearing her life apart, Sabina Miller refuses to be cowed by the memories – because “we won”.

Over 60 years after the war, Ms Miller went to Auschwitz with her family. She said, when she looked at the gates, she almost felt triumphant.

She said: “I am glad that we survived, although I am desperately upset with what is going on in the world, I wish there was more peace.

“I created a very warm and happy family, and that makes me be alive.

“I spoke to a little boy at a school, and he asked me if I feel guilty I survived. Not at all, I am glad.

“We won, in a way we all won. Four of my grandchildren in Auschwitz, they stood where the trains used to be and put their arms around each other, I realised we won.

“That is history, and we are here.”

An active member of the Holocaust Survivors Centre in Hendon, 94-year-old Ms Miller, born in Warsaw, remembers the moment when she first realised things were starting to change for the worse.

She said: “In Poland, it was hard all the time, but my sister applied to Warsaw University, when she went to the lectures she was forced to stand on the left with the other Jewish people, so it was harder for her to learn anything. That was anti-Semitism.

“Back then it was hard to understand, but looking back that was when we first knew something was wrong.”

Aged 16, Ms Miller and her family were forced to move to the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, where she lost both her parents to typhus and her sister Ester disappeared attempting to escape to Russia.

Eventually, she and her brother David were smuggled onto a train to an aunt living on the Polish side of the border.

She found work on a farm, but was forced to leave after the owner heard the Nazis were coming, and had to hide in a forest for weeks to escape.

She said: “We had to slide into a hole used by the partisan fighters, they were against the Germans, and so they helped us.

“We went out at night to sneak food, but we were in the hole for a while. My feet got very badly frozen.”

Ms Miller had a friend she met at the farm, who she knew only as “Ruszka”. One night she went out to fund supplies, but never returned.

Ms Miller says she has no idea what happened to her.

Eventually, she manged to find medical help and assumed the identity of a young Polish woman who was unwilling to undertake forced labour in Germany.

For Ms Miller, however, it was much better than the fate awaiting her if she stayed in Poland, as the Germans began moving Jewish people to concentration camps.

She said: “I spoke to the doctor, he helped me. He wanted to get me away from there. He told me to go to the waiting room at his surgery and look around for a girl who cries very bitterly, that means she has been accepted to labour camps in Germany but does not want to go.

“He told me what to say: ‘You were just released and do not have any papers, so you will go for her, and will take money to go instead as you come from a very poor home’”.

Ms Miller assumed a new identity, which she says saved her life – after working in Germany for a short period, she was accused of being a Jew and sent to prison in Warsaw, but avoided the concentration camps.

However, because she had the birth certificate of the non-Jewish girl whose identity she assumed, Ms Miller put in a regular cell rather than one specifically for Jewish people, and was eventually released.

After the War, Sabina reached England in 1947, married, and had two children, six granddaughters and four great grandchildren.

For more information on the Holocaust Survivor’s Centre, call 02082029844.