PUPILS at Dunmow s Helena Romanes School heard a first hand account of life in a concentration camp from a holocaust survivor on Friday. Joanna Millan spoke to students for an hour before answering their questions. Dr Paul Martin, head of humanities, said

PUPILS at Dunmow's Helena Romanes School heard a first hand account of life in a concentration camp from a holocaust survivor on Friday.

Joanna Millan spoke to students for an hour before answering their questions.

Dr Paul Martin, head of humanities, said: "Joanna came to talk to the pupils as part of their Citizenship and Religious Education studies to broaden their understanding of how prejudice has caused problems in the past and how we can avoid it happening again."

Mrs Millan gave pupils her personal story of how she had been sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague in June 1943 when she was 10 months old, and how, in May 1945, she was liberated by the Russian army and came to England in August 1945.

She also told them how her maternal grandmother and her father were killed in the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

Dr Martin said: "The pupils all listened attentively and asked questions, which showed they had learnt things from the talk that they would not have been able to get from text books.