To mark UK Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow, Free Press reporter, Lia Hind, spoke with Holocaust survivor, Mady Gerrard, who lives in St Arvans.

TO many, Mady Gerrard, 80, is a name best associated with designer boutiques and exciting locations. But behind the success of the Hungarian-born grandmother, whose fashion designs gained her a string of high-profile clients, is the heartrending story of a young girl who lived through and survived the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust.

Mady was born in Budapest on April 27 1930. An only child, she was to experience grief early in her life when her mother passed away from tuberculosis when Mady was just seven-years-old. Her father sent her to live with her great-aunt Gisella, of whom Mady was extremely close and where her passion for clothes and creativity began.

"My great-aunt ran a sort of haberdashery shop and I used to go with her when she would buy for the shop. I loved all the beautiful materials and things."

Tragically, for Mady and the tens of thousands of Hungarian-Jews, in 1944, when she was just 14-years-old, Hitler's Nazis invaded and thousands of families were deported and sent to Auschwitcz - a network of concentration and extermination camps in Poland.

"We were piled into these cattle trains," she recalls. "It was July 5 and we didn't arrive in Auschwitz until July 8 - three days in the most horrendous conditions. People were dying around you and their bodies just thrown out on to the tracks."

Mady spent almost seven months in Auschwitcz, she was in a group of around 1,100 young girls that was to see only around 100 survive.

"I remember the selection process was carried out by Dr Megele - known as the Angel of Death. We would have to get in line, naked, with our hands above our heads. If you had so much as a blemish on your body he would pick you out and send you to the gas chamber.

"I was picked that evening. My friend Eva and I were taken down to small room. There was a gap in the timber doorframe along the top and I said to Eva, 'We have to get out of here and back to the barracks, I tried to persuade her to come, but she wouldn't. "I got out but I never saw her again. That was the most horrible day of my whole life. For decades, I couldn't get it out of my head - I felt I should have done more to persuade her." Mady was later moved to Belsen, which she described as even more horrific. "People were dying and rotting all around you - you could be talking to someone and they would literally just die."

After the liberation, Mady moved to Sweden and then back to Hungary, where she married and had a daughter, Ildi, who now has three children of her own. She moved to Britain in 1956 and went on to run a highly successful boutique in Cardiff before re-locating to New York where she personally designed clothes for President Nixon's wife, Dionne Warwick, Shirley Bassey and Susannah York - to name but a few. She later returned to Britain and settled in St Arvans, where she continues to design clothes under her own label.