A HOLOCAUST survivor told pupils at a Cwmbran school of his harrowing experiences in a concentration camp.

Steven Frank, 66, told children at Fairwater High School how he lived through Hitler's Final Solution.

Mr Frank, born of Anglo-Dutch Jewish parentage, was aged five when German jackboots marched down the streets of Amsterdam in the summer of 1940.

He told how the Nazis began excluding Dutch Jews from all aspects of everyday life and forcing anyone over the age of five to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothes. His father, a successful lawyer, was murdered by the Germans at Auschwitz in January 1943 after he had been betrayed for his part in the forging of papers for Jews to escape from Holland.

"He kissed us goodbye one morning and we never saw him again. "We heard that he was badly tortured, had his teeth knocked out and was transported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz."

As the Germans started losing the war, the Final Solution gathered momentum and Dutch Jews began to be sent to the death camps of eastern Europe.

In September 1943 Mr Frank, his mother, and two brothers were sent to Westerbork in Holland - a transit camp for Auschwitz.

He said: "The conditions were appalling and I went a whole year without having a bath. "Typhus, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, was rife."

The family was transported to Theresienstadt transit camp in Czechoslovakia - and finally liberated on May 8, 1945, later discovering every Jew at the camp was due to be killed on May 15.

Mr Frank said: "There were 15,000 children just like me who entered Theresienstadt and only 93 came out alive."

His family then settled in England and Mr Frank became a chemist. He now regularly gives talks at schools all over Britain, the Imperial War Museum and the Holocaust Museum in Nottingham. He said: "I dedicate all my talks to the memory of those who died."