Pinner group hears the poignant case of an Auschwitz survivor

"As soon as I saw it, what came back to me was not so much the horror of it all, but simply the smell of that cardboard and imitation snakeskin suitcase," she recalled.

"The curators asked me if I wanted my property returned. I debated this with fellow members of Jewish Care's Holocaust Survivors' Centre in Hendon.

"Half of them said I should claim it back. The other half, including myself, thought it was better for the case to stay where it was as a permanent testimony to what happened."

She today lives in the same Bayswater building from which the British Special Operations Executive planned the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, known as "The Butcher of Prague" and one of the architects of the Final Solution.

Pinner members queued until late in the evening to purchase copies of her autobiography, The Tin Ring, whose title was inspired by a tin ring given to her by her boyfriend as a symbol of love and a commitment to marriage if they both survived - which he did not.

Other speakers at the commemoration included another Czech-born survivor, Victor Greenberg, and former UK ambassador to Israel Sir Andrew Burns.