The horrors of the Jewish Holocaust and more recent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur come under the spotlight this weekend, as Oxfordshire marks Holocaust Memorial Day.

Today (January 27) is the sixth annual Holocaust Memorial Day, and the theme -- One person can make a difference -- will be commemorated by a range of exhibitions, concerts and talks by survivors, including Renata Calverley, 68, from Oxford.

Mrs Calverley was due to address students and visitors at Oxford Brookes University, this afternoon (January 27), about her experiences as a child imprisoned by the Nazis in a Polish ghetto.

She said: "I was a child of two years old when war broke out. My father had already been sent to Europe to fight and my mother, grandmother and I were put into the ghetto in Przemysl, in south-east Poland, where we lived.

"My mother and grandmother were then sent to Auschwitz -- I never saw them again. But I was hidden by someone in a room -- I would have only been about five years old.

"Later, I was smuggled out, covered by straw on the back of a cart, by a sympathetic woman who could come in to deliver food. I was cared for for a time by an aunt, but she and her daughter were killed." When Mrs Calverley was six, she was put into an orphanage, which she described as "the worst experience of my life".

She added: "Eventually, I was reunited with a great aunt and her husband, who had lost their sons in the war. Then suddenly, after all those years, a letter came from my father.

"I learned he had searched for me throughout the war, without luck.

"In 1946, after the war, and after not seeing him since I was 18 months old, we were reunited in England. It was the most profound and moving experience of my life."

Mrs Calverley has spoken to many groups about her experiences of the Holocaust, but while she is anxious that such atrocities are remembered and learned from, she is adamant they should not be remembered with hatred.

"Going through something like that does affect your life, but I'm a very positive person. I survived and was one of the lucky ones, and I believe that hatred and bitterness are destructive," she said.

"I am determined, for my part, to encourage people to think about what happened, and to learn from it, but not to carry on the hatred." Holocaust Memorial Day began with the passing of a resolution by the United Nations General Assembly and marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.

Liz Marcus, co-president of the Oxford University Jewish Society, said: "Holocaust Memorial Day should make us recall not only the unprecedented events that occurred in Europe 60 years ago, but also the more recent genocide in Rwanda.

"It is a telling reminder of the capacity of human beings to commit evil against each other."