IT should have been a day of unbridled joy. Six years of a desperate existence in a Nazi prison camp had come to an end for the two French children. Six years when Mirelle and her brother Jean had only each other for comfort, each trying to protect the other from the brutality of the guards.

But in the confusion of the camp's liberation, amid the elation and the stampede as the gates were opened, 11-year-old Mirelle tragically became separated from her younger brother, who was then just nine. Although Mirelle did eventually find her mother again, Jean seemed simply to disappear.

Feeling she did not fit in with her mother's new family, Mirelle was taken by nuns to live in England, where she thought she would hear no more from the brother she saw as "my other half, the person who made me one". She became convinced he was dead and was tormented by doubts over his fate. She even hid his existence from her husband.

Wracked with uncertainty, the hope inside her never ceased burning, although there were times when it was so faint it was barely flickering - until the day a letter dropped on the mat of her County Durham home. Gently, she picked it up. Slowly, she tore it open. When she did manage to read it, it was nearly an hour before she could speak. After six years of searching, and 52 years since they were separated, the Salvation Army had finally managed to find her brother.

Events then moved with an almost frightening speed. Two days after receiving the letter, Mirelle was waiting with her husband Raymond for her brother to arrive at their home. And when he was more than an hour late, the tension became almost too much.

"I was in a panic, and when I panic, I really panic," says Mirelle, now 66. "He was supposed to be here at four o'clock but it got to five and I was in a state. I really thought he had had an accident and died. Raymond asked what I wanted, and I have no idea why, but the first thing that popped into my head was a Pot Noodle."

As her husband went to the shop, he noticed a strange car moving uncertainly through the streets of Sacriston. Jean had managed to navigate through London, but had got lost in the sprawling pit village. Raymond took him home, to meet the sister he hadn't seen half a century.

"There aren't the words for that moment when we met really," says Mirelle. "We tried to talk, to laugh, to cry and to stay still and to jump up and down all at the same time. I never did get my Pot Noodle!"

Their ordeal started when a member of the French Resistance burst into their Paris home, fleeing from German soldiers. But the soldiers were hot on his heels and followed him in. The family was arrested for harbouring an enemy and taken away and imprisoned.

Mirelle and Jean spent the next six years in a prison camp. After the end of the war, their German guards were replaced by the Allies and it was several months before they were allowed to leave.

After Mirelle and Jean became separated, Mirelle was reunited with her mother, but it was not a happy occasion. Her mother had a new family after the war, and didn't want to know her daughter from her previous life. Mirelle never forgot her beloved younger brother, but the move to England overwhelmed the frightened and bewildered 11-year-old. "You have to remember I was uneducated of anything, even that the war had ended," she says. "I didn't know the sea and the ocean really existed. Everything, and I mean everything, was unbelievable, just getting on a boat. It was scary but an adventure at the same time.

"Then, when we got to England, there were the people who now I would call 'cannybodies', women who were being kind. I remember they gave us cuddles. I didn't really know about cuddles, everything was unbelievable. They gave us this tea which was the most disgusting thing you ever tasted. I never had a cup of tea again."

Mirelle was taken to County Durham, where a number of children were to meet guardians and foster parents in a hall. "You know those scenes in the films, where there is a child left all alone who nobody wants," she says. "Well that was me. My guardian was late and I thought I was going to be left in this strange place where I couldn't understand what anybody was saying."

When Mirelle's guardian did arrive, she was taken to High Spen, near Rowlands Gill, Gateshead. Then, and only then, she started to cry. "Almost the first words I learned in English were 'don't cry'," she says. Her guardians, Jane and Oswald Short, did their best to make a new home for Mirelle, and help her forget her past, particularly at Christmas.

"I remember coming down the stairs and there was all this tinsel and baubles and things I had never seen," she says. "It was fairyland, it really was. I am sure every house on the street must have got me a present. There was so much. And the talk of Santa Claus was a wonder. I must have been having a bit of a second childhood because I refused not to believe in Santa Claus until I was 16 and then I cried and cried.

"In this new world it was hard to go back and find Jean. When you are a child it is hard."

Mirelle went on to work as a hairdresser but when she married, her husband discouraged her from looking for her brother. When she met and married her second husband, Raymond, she never mentioned her brother, believing Raymond wouldn't want her to look for Jean either.

But eventually, after they had been married 15 years, she told Raymond about Jean, and he encouraged her to find her brother. She contacted the Salvation Army, but television appeals and searches through post-war records proved fruitless, until that letter arrived three years ago.

After their reunion, Mirelle learned her brother had been a professional wrestler, a paratrooper, a personal bodyguard, a bouncer at the Follies, and, finally, a pub and restaurant owner, in the process fathering 11 children. Mirelle and Raymond regularly spend a month at a time at Jean's family home in Brittany and she is rapidly relearning her forgotten first language.

Three years ago, Mirelle's only family was her husband. Now, against all expectations, she has her brother again, as well as his family. Now, she is determined to cling on to the family she thought she would never see again, as well as the one she never knew she had.

"Every night Jean says, 'goodnight big sister', and I say, 'goodnight little brother'," she says. "It is so lovely to hear and say those words."