A HOLOCAUST survivor has stressed the importance of being tolerant towards minority groups.

Janine Webber, 92, hid under a wardrobe with her family before working as a shepherd and living in a convent under a false identity to avoid Nazi persecution during World War II.

She also lost both of her parents within months of each other by the age of nine.

Now an experienced public speaker, Ms Webber, who lives in north-east London, shared her story to mark Holocaust Memorial Day today and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp.

Ms Webber said she was unable to talk about her story for 50 years and only decided to share her experience after encouragement from her own children.

She said: “When I was interviewed for the first time I told my story in total. I could not stop crying.”

Ms Webber has been giving talks on her experiences to schools and businesses for more than 20 years with the Holocaust Educational Trust.

She said Holocaust Memorial Day “means to respect people.”

“My message is always to be tolerant towards the minorities, to respect and be kind to people even if they look different, speak differently or have a different religion or different colour of skin,” Ms Webber said.

“I hope that people will give this message. We are all human beings. We all come from the same family.”

Born in Lviv, Poland, now in modern-day Ukraine, in 1932, Ms Webber was living in the city when Germany invaded the region, then occupied by the USSR, in June 1941.

Thousands of people were murdered within weeks of the invasion as Jewish communities in the city were immediately targeted.

Ms Webber took refuge with her aunt, uncle and a group of other Jewish people in a convent.

She obtained false identity papers from her aunt and was sent to a second convent in Krakow, where she lived with a priest.

Ms Webber went on to work as a maid while living with an elderly couple and said a Nazi officer had spent the night at their home in the days before the liberation.

Reunited with her aunt after the war, they moved to Paris where Ms Webber was put in a children’s home.

“They didn’t want us to talk about the war,” she said.

“The people in charge [of the home] were Jews, but they wanted us to forget.”