A Faversham woman who helped save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust has told of her remarkable story.

Clara Roberts, now 92, was just 22 when - during the latter stages of the Second World War - an alliance between Germany and Hungary broke down and the Nazis stormed her home city of Budapest.

As the world’s eyes turn to Auschwitz today to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation, Clara, who was born into a Jewish family, relives her truly inspiring, yet horrifying, memories of life in Hitler’s Hungary.

From April 1944, Jewish families living in the countryside and small towns were ordered to move into certain cities, and by the end of July, the only remaining Jewish community was in Budapest, where Clara and her family lived.

Between May 15 and July 9, 437,402 Jews had been deported to the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz, where 90% of them were murdered on arrival.

About 565,000 Hungarian Jews were massacred during the Holocaust in just a matter of months.

But in what Clara describes as “God’s special mercy”, her family found a way out of their preordained road to hell, and in turn, provided solace for hundreds of others.

As the Nazi tanks rolled into Budapest, plans were bubbling under the surface and as women and children were gunned down on the street or shoved into Jewish ghettos ready to be shipped off to concentration camps, many had planned their own revolt against the regime – the underground movement was beginning.

One of those making waves was Julius Bihari, Clara’s father.

Clara says, thinking back, that he must have seen what was happening in Nazi Germany and across Europe, where so many Jewish families had been exterminated since 1941 under Hitler’s rule.

Julius had foreseen his own family’s fate.

In a courageous bid to save them, the artist meticulously manufactured counterfeit birth certificates so they read that Clara, her brothers Stephen and George, and mother Rosa were all born into Catholicism. He created the perfect Aryan document.

Clara says: “He could see what was happening in Nazi Germany and the Jewish people in Hungary were so terrified

“My father was an artist – it came naturally to him. He worked very late at night, secretly, to create these documents.”

As word spread across the communities, Julius began making hundreds of birth certificates which Clara and her mother would sneak into poverty-stricken Jewish ghettos, taking with them food and clothing, which were so scarce.

During this time, the Biharis met Raoul Wallenberg, who was later to become a world-renowned figure for his phenomenal humanitarian efforts helping the Jewish.

Wallenberg is known to have saved the lives of more than 100,000 Jews by creating thousands of forged protective passes and helping to smuggle families into neutral, safer European countries or moving them into Swedish houses in Budapest.

Working alongside Wallenberg, the Biharis, and hundreds of other revolutionaries from the underground movement, created the passes and intercepted trains on their way to Auschwitz.

They handed out these life-saving documents and provided a safety net for those who would otherwise have been brutally massacred.

Wallenberg established hospitals, nurseries and soup kitchens in designated safe houses across Budapest – they were reserved for Jews holding these certificates of protection.

Clara remembers Wallenberg.

“He was a very special man,” she says. “He just hated what the Nazis did to people simply because they were Jewish. He risked his life to help so many. He was someone who everyone could rely on.”

"The Nazis were so cruel. I don’t know how people could act like that. They treated humans like less than animals, like less than vermin..." - Clara Roberts

In January 1945, the Soviets liberated Hungary and the Nazis were moved out.

Just 120,000 Jews survived the Nazi extermination in Hungary and Clara and her family were just some of the lucky ones.

For Clara, her life in Budapest was coming to an end and by 1948 she had moved to London, where she met her husband Frank a year later.

Her parents stayed in Budapest until the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, when they too moved to London.

Seventy years later, Clara still has vivid memories of her haunted past, and her daughter Angie, who lives in Oare, says that her mother has never experienced fear since the Holocaust, completely desensitised by the horror she lived through in her 20s.

She now seems, somehow, to show some glimmer of forgiveness, but little things still reveal signs of the effect the atrocities still has on her. For one, she has always refused to speak German.

Clara says: “The Nazis were so cruel. I don’t know how people could act like that. They treated humans like less than animals, like less than vermin.

“Everyone knew that Hitler wanted to eliminate the Jews. In one of his famous speeches, he said he would get rid of all of the Jews, and he meant it. He really meant it.”

When asked how her and her family had found the bravery to put their lives on the line in such a terrifying, unpredictable situation, Clara simply says: “That’s just what you do.”