TOMORROW, millions of people across Europe will commemorate the most shameful chapter of 20th century history -- the Holocaust. It was the Nazis' assault on the Jews between 1933 and 1945, culminating in the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe', in which six million Jews were murdered. DANNY BRIERLEY speaks to one survivor who now talks to East Lancashire schoolchildren about the horrors and whose memory of the events is still vivid today.

THE Jews were not the only victims of Nazism. It is estimated that as many as 15 million civilians were killed by a murderous and racist regime, including millions of Slavs and 'Asiatics', 200,000 Gipsies and members of various other groups.

Thousands of people were sterilised.

The Jews figured in Nazi ideology as the arch-enemy of the 'Aryan race', and were targeted not merely for terror and repression but for complete extinction.

The Nazis failed in this aim because they ran out of time, but they pursued it fanatically until their defeat in 1945.

The Holocaust led to widespread public awareness of genocide and to modern efforts to prevent it, such as the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.

One survivor of the Nazi period, Thea Hurst, 76, now visits schools across East Lancashire recounting her experiences in the hope that it will never be repeated. She is disturbed by the rise of nationalism across the country.

She said: "I was seven-years-old when Hitler came to power. I remember my parents being perpetually worried and preoccupied.

"When they came home from work they were tired and unapproachable. My brother and I listened to their nightly conversations that we only half understood.

"Words like visa, passport, emigration, quota, Palestine, America, Canada were repeated again and again.

"We sensed that they related to serious and important matters, but we were too young to understand their implications."

Thea fled Nazi Germany in 1938. Her father's fur shop in their native town of Leipzig had been destroyed during 'Kristalnacht' or the Night of Broken Glass.

That night homes, shops and synagogues were looted and burned. It was also, Thea recalls, the night when the Nazis showed their true feelings towards the Jewish population in Germany.

"They showed us that we were nothing. That we had no rights, no-one to complain to and no-one to turn to.

"They broke down the doors of our homes and shops. They looted and destroyed. They burnt our synagogues and set our school on fire. They dragged most of the men away.

"Throughout Germany, Jewish people shuddered and trembled and roused themselves into action.

"It was time to go, to leave, to find refuge. On that fateful night in November my childhood ended.

"For what is childhood. Is it not being rooted and secure, sheltered and wanted?"

Thea and her mother, Rosa, eventually found sanctuary in England, but her father, Lazar, perished at Treblinka, a notorious concentration camp where Jews were gassed by the thousand.

Riots in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford and the resurgence of nationalist political parties have alarmed Thea.

She said: "Nationalism is a very dangerous thing."

Her father's full story remained a mystery to Thea until she received a letter from Warsaw. The letter was written by a woman who met her father at the beginning of the war.

It tells of how after being denied the right to earn a living, he was forced to play cards for money. The writer describes him as a careful player who managed to avoid starvation for a time.

Later he found work in a fur factory where his pay was 2oz of bread with marmalade and a bowl of soup every day. He managed to avoid being captured for a time but was eventually caught in the streets and sent to a concentration camp.

The letter claims that other prisoners who escaped from the train carriages remember him calming people with his 'unshakeable belief in God' as the locomotive carried them to their death.

A diary of Thea's childhood recollections has already been published in Germany and several publishers in Britain have expressed an interest in serialising her account of Nazi Germany. She faithfully kept a log as her world crumbled around her. The accounts include her days at a Jewish school.

"During the next six years the diary became my best friend. I confided my thoughts and my feelings.

"I discussed my problems and observed the world.

"The diary is my personal story, yet I venture to suggest that it reflects the struggles and conflicts of many young people of my generation who were lucky enough to survive the war in an alien country and who had to find value and meaning in life against the impact of the Holocaust and the second World War."

At Bridgewater Hall in Manchester on Sunday, Thea will take part in The Holocaust and Great Britain, a series of events linking what happened in Europe 60 years ago with issues of tolerance today. A smaller service will take place in the Peace Garden in Burnley town centre at 2pm.