More than 400 hundred people fell silent during a moving ceremony in Rickmansworth last night.

St Joan of Arc School, in Rickmansworth High Street, hosted one of 70 specially designed candles that was lit to mark the 70 anniversary of prisoners being freed from Auschwitz.

However, during a special event in the town, candles were lit to commemorate other genocides, including the Rwandan Genocide and the Srebrenica massacre.

Nelly Ben-Or Clynes, a Polish survivor from the Holocaust, told members of the public, school children and teachers and politicians, about her and her families’ experiences during the Holocaust and how they escaped.

She told the audience: "Somehow, my sister had found a way of contacting two very brave and extraordinary people, a doctor and an assistant nurse.

"He was himself Jewish, but pretended to be German because he came from Prague and spoke perfect German.

"Between them they were helping as many people as they could."

Ms Ben-Or Clynes told the audience how the doctor had dressed in a German officer’s uniform, walked past the guards of the ghetto where hundreds of Jewish people were being held captive and helped the family escape.

She said: "He brought out my sister, and then the next day, he brought out my mother and myself out and then two days later, he was supposed to bring out my father.

"But it was too late. My father had been taken to another extermination camp and we never saw him again.

"There was one moment which was miraculous when we heard they were coming in trucks to send us to places like Auschwitz or like my sister, to some extermination place in the country.

Ms Ben-Or Clynes sister had previously escaped from a death camp out in the countryside and made her way back to the family.

The international concert pianist said: "We were together with a few other families outside the building and there was a fence and a smaller fence and an outer-building.

"People ran and hid between these two fences. There was 12-14 people hid between the two fences, but there was one lady with a very young baby, probably a few weeks old, "We heard the Nazi’s run into the empty building, and cursing when they did not find anybody.

"If the baby had made even the slightest noise, we would have been killed.

The family then found relatively safety by travelling to Warsaw.

However, the audience heard that when the family reached the station, the only train left heading for the Polish capital was a train specially reserved for SS officers.

Ms Ben-Or Clynes said: "It was like an invitation into the Lions’ Den.

"A few hours later, the train arrived and the station master took us into a compartment.

"There were four high-ranking officers.

The audience heard how the officers then moved onto another bench, on the other side of the compartment to allow the child to sleep on the bench.

"I wanted to tell the young people about this.

"They were sympathetic enough to take care of a little girl and to make sure she slept through the night.

"That same little girl, had they known she was Jewish, she would have been taken off the train and shot just because she was Jewish."

Children from St Joan of Arc Catholic School, in Rickmansworth, Bushey Meads School, Little Green Junior School, Watford School of Music, Westfield Academy, Rickmansworth Park and Rickmansworth Park JMI School, Edwinstree Middle School, St Clement Danes School and Yavneh college all performed different musical and theatrical acts to commemorate different genocides seen in the World.

The event has been organised and funded by Hertfordshire SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education).