AN exhibition urging people never to forget the atrocities of the Holocaust has opened in Darlington Town Hall.

The borough council's display has been arranged in conjunction with various groups around the town to mark the first ever national Holocaust Memorial day, which takes place on January 27.

Organised to mark the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is expected to be continued annually.

One of the people involved in the setting up of the exhibition was Maria Chapman.

A second-generation survivor, Maria's Polish father, Tadeusz Korfanty, survived the torture of imprisonment when he, his father and his brother were tried in Berlin for treason against the German state.

He was sentenced to four years' hard labour and eventually subjected to further horror in concentration camps at Mautthaussen and then Gusen. His father, Edmund, died in a Gestapo prison. Brother Richard died in Gusen from an injection of petrol into the heart.

Having been sentenced at the age of 20, Tadeusz was 23 when he was liberated - weighing 4st 1oz.

Few survived such imprisonment, but Tadeusz started a family and had many stories to tell. These varied from tales of fun, outwitting the Germans, to stories of horror that would send him into a deep depression. And the effect this had on his family life is told by Maria, who lives in Darlington, in an exhibition urging people never to forget the atrocities.

She said: "It's about my father, really, and about my family that I never saw and never knew - only from photographs."

She warns an important part of not forgetting the past is being aware it could happen today, in this country.

"My father used to like to tell the fun stories and then every now and then the bad stories would come out and he would sink into depression," she said.

One such occasion was when Maria's sister was first old enough to buy a present for her father's birthday and she gave him a pair of pyjamas, unaware of their similarity to the camp uniforms.

"He became almost hysterical," recalled Maria, who looks shaken when remembering the effect his incarceration had on her father.

Tadeusz died in 1992, peacefully, aged 70.

Of the exhibition and her reasons for opening the book on her family life, she said: "It's really about learning that it doesn't happen again, and it has happened again."

At the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Mautthaussen, Maria met a Yugoslavian woman who told her of the similarities between the camp and what had been happening in her country.

She said: "People have to take notice and learn it could just as easily happen here."

The exhibition, featuring artwork by Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form art students, is on until January 27.