A HOLOCAUST survivor has told Oxford pupils of his parents’ death in a Nazi concentration camp and how he kept his brother alive by smuggling him lumps of potato.

Retired engineer Rudi Oppenheimer, 79, was visiting Matthew Arnold School, Cumnor, ahead of a trip by 70 pupils to Auschwitz in April.

As a German-born Jew with a British passport, his family were classified as “Exchange” Jews who could be swapped for German prisoners and were immune from the harshest Nazi treatment.

But during the winter of 1944 to 1945, the family still starved at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, with both his mother and father dying of illness.

Rudi, his brother Paul and sister Eve all survived the camp.

Charged with dishing out the thin gruel served to inmates, Mr Oppenheimer ensured his brother got lumps of potato that had sunk to the bottom of the pot to keep him alive.

He said: “The worst thing for me was the hunger. We were hungry and thirsty all the time. There was no water most of the time.

“It sounds wrong, but when our parents died, we did not miss them because we were looking for food all day and night. As youngsters, we did not think about dying.”

Mr Oppenheimer, who now lives in London, said he visited schools because the lessons of the Holocaust still had not been learned, and genocide still happens.

Pupil Francis Krajewski, 14, said: “It was really interesting.

“He was not scared to talk about things that some people would not want to hear.”

Kira Norton, 13, said: “The most awful bit was when he talked about how his parents died. He did not even have the chance to say goodbye.”

The school has been running visits to Auschwitz for four years Religious Education teacher Therese Magee said: “There are not many Holocaust survivors left who want to talk about their experiences. When the pupils see the gas chambers they really realise what happened.”