RENATE Collins, now living in Rogiet, was only five years old when her mother put her on board a train to the UK with just a few possessions including leather shoes and her ice skates.

She thought she was going on holiday.

Instead, she was on the last ‘Kindertransport’ train to leave Prague before war broke out - sending Jewish children to safety in the UK, without their parents.

After she left, the Nazis killed 64 members of her family in the Holocaust. She will remember them today as part of a UK wide day of remembrance.

Mrs Collins came close to being numbered among them as her 26-year-old mother almost didn’t let her leave due to her high temperature with chicken pox. But the family doctor told her: “If you don’t put Renate on this train, she will never go.”

After making sure her child was safe, her mother and father Hilda Kress and Otto Heinz Kress would be sent to concentration camps along with her grandmother, uncle, great aunt and six million other Jews from across Europe.

Mrs Collins, now 81, has little left of them now, but still wears her mother and grandmother’s engagement rings which were smuggled out of Treblinka in a loaf of bread.

She arrived in Britain as a child with a visa stamped with a swastika and went to stay with a family in the Rhondda, who her mother had helped her write letters to before she left home.

With a child’s innocence of what was happening, she wrote: “I hope there is no spinach in England. But I do hope there are many ice creams over there as I am terribly fond of it and can be throughout a whole day the best girl in the world if I get plenty of it.

“I am thanking you for all you are going to do for me, and I will be a very good child to you.”

She also has a letter her mother wrote to Rev Fred Coppleston and his wife Arianwen: “I’m thanking you for your beautiful and helpful letter. I would call myself happy to know my little one in a surrounding of so much affection and love.”

Now a grandmother of five, she only knew two words of English when she arrived in the Rhondda as a girl: yes and no.

Back in Prague, Mrs Collins had not known who the Nazis were or what they stood for – only that she shouldn’t have anything to do with the men in black coats and hats.

She said: “My grandmother died in Treblinka with my mother. Treblinka was a camp where they went to be gassed – there were no buildings there apart from where the soldiers lived. They were sent in and taken to the chambers. There were nearly 900,000 Jews gassed in Treblinka.

“When the war was about to end, the Germans decided they were going to dig up the bodies and burn them.”

Mrs Collins now has no family members on the continent following the Nazi’s programme to systematically murder Jews. “I’m the only one left,” she said.

After the tragedy of her early years, Mrs Collins came to love her new family and later started her own in the UK. She had a career in the catering industry and got married in 1954, living in Porth’s Vaynor Street and Cornwall before moving to Rogiet in Monmouthshire in 2002.

Mrs Collins said anti-Semitism was not a thing of the past - and it's important the Holocaust is remembered.

“I believe in Belgium synagogues were set alight and I understand the Cardiff synagogues now have to have security. It’s sad."

At a service in Cardiff today, Mrs Collins and other Holocaust survivors will pass candles to the next generation.

“Most people are in their nineties now, so we’ve got to hand it on to the next generation to keep the memory,” she said.