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Helga Weiss was a teenage girl who survived the Holocaust. She lied about her age to the "Angel of Death", Josef Mengele.  She also survived to 4 different concentration camps.

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There were 1,500 children who didn't make it past Terezin. There were about 100 who did and Helga is one of them.

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This was the first camp she went to and the least harsh as she described. She spent 3 years here which was where she spent most time overall. Over 32,00 people died before transports to execution camps even began, but It was a "paradise" compared to Auschwitz she says. She made friends, had dances, and even found her first love. There were secret operas, musicals, lectures, and even more. "And you know, it was not good. But those of us who passed through other camps remember Terezin like a paradise," she says about it. She made her first drawing here, she drew what she saw. She describes that piece, "It shows they wanted to decimate us psychologically as well as physically."

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This was the largest, and worst camp of all in the Holocaust. Helga went there for only 10 days and she says it was horrible. This was where she had to lie about her age. From here is where her father was shipped to what she thinks was the gas chambers.

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After her 10 days in Auschwitz, she was sent to Freiburg. For 5 months, she polished German Airplane parts. Then came the 16-Day Death Train to Mauthausen. Many things happened during the travel. People survived off of sugar, three babies were born, dead bodies were thrown off the train, it was so filled they couldn't move. "This journey was very bad," she explains. They were headed straight for the gas chambers. Two days before they reached the destination, it was destroyed. They were liberated by Allied Forces. She survived.

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This is her art

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This is a drawing she made for her friend's birthday in Terezin

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This is a drawing she made for her friend's birthday in Terezin

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She spent 3 years in Terezin before going to Auschwitz. Once she got there, everyone was sent on a platform. Some selection began. People fit to work went right and those who were not were sent left. That is where she had to say she was 17 instead of 14 in order to live. She went to the right with her mother, which meant she lived. After spending about 10 days in Auschwitz, she and her mother were transported to Freiburg. They spent 5 months polishing German airplane parts. Their next destination was the gas chambers of Mauthausen. There was a 16-day "Death Train" between the two camps. Many people died on the travel there alone. Two days before they got to the destination, it was destroyed by Allied Forces. She and her mother got out alive.

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Helga Weiss was transported to Terezín concentration camp at the age of 12. She tells Nicholas Shakespeare how she came to write - and draw - the most moving child's-eye testimony since the diary of Anne Frank.

At Helga Weiss's first concentration camp, a boy of her age, 14, wrote a poem she has never forgotten. It ends:

Butterflies don't live here,

Helga got out of the ghetto and eventually back to Prague, where she lives in a short street of flat-fronted apartment blocks. I speak into an intercom, and she lets me in, not taking her finger off the buzzer. The buzzing pursues me up four flights of granite steps, all the way to her open door, breaking off only as I step inside. She stands, waiting, in the hallway, an old woman no taller than a girl: black trousers, blue eyes, short grey hair - and, hanging on a silver chain around her neck, a stone in the shape of a butterfly wing.

"This is the apartment I was born in," she says, leading the way into a small drawing room crammed with books and paintings. "It's not the most comfortable, not the most beautiful, but I have become attached to it. From this apartment we were deported."

I look around, quickly taking in a piano (on the same spot where her father, a bank official, used to play Chopin), a brown sofa scattered with knitted cushions ("saved by our non-Jewish friends during the war") and a contemporary poster of a young female cellist, her granddaughter. It's much later that I notice the butterflies.

"I have a lot of butterflies," she agrees, and points at the stained-glass orange one embedded in the window, four dangling in the net curtain, a blue one pinned to the wall. "Because butterflies mean freedom."

She finds it interesting that there were none at Terezín - "only lice and bedbugs". It was while watching a butterfly settle on a flower as she stumbled up the hill to her fourth and final concentration camp, Mauthausen, that Helga reached a simple decision: she wanted to live. Of the 15,000 Jewish children under the age of 15 deported to Terezín, Helga was one of a mere 100 ever to see Prague again.

Helga - now Helga Hosková-Weissová, her married name - is, incredibly, a survivor of Terezín, Auschwitz, Freiberg and Mauthausen; an artist, a widow and a great-grandmother; and, in her 84th year, the published author of a remarkable journal describing her girlhood as a prisoner of the Nazis.

If it seems surprising that such a diary should surface at this point, it should be explained that parts of it were published in the Sixties, in a Czech anthology, and Helga had no idea anyone was interested beyond that. In Czechoslovakia, no one cared about the Jews: "First of all, no one figured on us returning," she explains, and in 1948 there was the Communist coup, at which point, "the situation for Jews here was pretty ugly". Yet talking to Helga, it becomes possible to imagine what it might be like chatting with Anne Frank, also born in 1929, had she lived.

"We were sitting here and heard the knocking on the door. It always happened at night. There were already rumours that this evening someone from the Jewish community would distribute the summons, so we expected it. After 8pm it was forbidden to go outside. No Jew would come up those stairs, nor an Aryan. So when there was a knock, it couldn't be anyone else." It was December 4 1941.

While they waited with a huge crowd at the Trade Fair Palace, Helga experienced her first period. A German officer promised that they were going to a safe place where they would not be persecuted. In the event, they were among 45,000 Prague Jews who were transported by train to the fortress of Terezín, three hours away. It was snowing. Men were immediately separated from women, parents from children. Helga was put in a room with about 30 girls her age. She tried to see her parents for an hour each day, and made a pact with her father to think of each other every evening at 7pm. "Sometimes it was not possible." Soon after, she sent him a childish drawing of a snowman. His reaction: "Draw what you see." So she did.

The sole footage that exists is a propaganda film promoting Terezín as a "spa town" for the benefit of a visit by the Red Cross. "Education was forbidden, but the Germans wanted to show it was a normal place." A building was tarted up to look like a school, with a sign reading "Holidays" to explain the absence of teachers and pupils. More signs pointed the way to parks and public baths. "We were not allowed to go outside to see the Red Cross. The Germans chose a group of young people and gave them a basket with vegetables, and they had to walk along and sing. It was all a stage, a performance, a humbug."

Helga depicted the reality in her drawings, and because the Germans forbade photographs, these drawings, which were recovered after the war along with her Terezín journal, have become an important testimony. She flicks through a book of them, pausing over an ink sketch of a man checking his blanket for bedbugs or "blechy". She says: "I killed them by hand. They were small, but when they had eaten or drunk they bloated up - and what is most terrible, full of blood."

Her favourite drawing is of a funeral cart loaded with bread, and bearing the logo "Welfare for the young". She says: "It was the only vehicle at Terezín. They wanted to decimate us psychologically too. Everything was carried on it - luggage, old people, dirty linen - except dead bodies." As for those famous baskets of vegetables, which Helga and other children spent their days cultivating, she snorts: "It was all for the Germans."

Hunger drove her to hide cabbages and lettuce in her underwear, but she had to be alert in case the Germans searched her, ready to throw the food away or gulp it down. "Once it happened to me that I was walking under a plum tree and I took a plum and shared it, and some worker saw me - because we were watched by the Jews too. And after that we were going to be included in a transport, until my father managed to stop it. For one plum, you could pay with your life."

In October 1944, Helga's father was loaded on to a railway truck. The Germans explained that the men were going ahead to prepare another ghetto. "We were not sure about anything. We wanted to believe it." He hugged her head to his chest. She could distinctly hear his heart beating. "Till today, I see him. He climbed on to the steps of the truck. He was waving and trying to smile, but it was not a smile."

Three days later, it was the turn of Helga and her mother. Their destination - Auschwitz-Birkenau - meant nothing to them. "We had no idea of extermination camps. We had no idea gas chambers existed. We didn't know till the moment we got there. The train stopped and we saw a big area with barracks and barbed wire and smoking chimneys. We supposed it was a factory." She waits for it to sink in. "Everything was terrible, but everything was much worse than we supposed."

She stepped on to the ramp with her mother. Prisoners in striped jackets whispered instructions, helping them. "Don't say you are ill, don't say you are young, or tomorrow you will go through the chimney." A German officer stood at the head of the queue directing people right and left. "I am often asked if this was Josef Mengele. Probably it was. I don't remember his face, only his gloves, but his face is not important. The important thing was his finger, because with his finger he pointed right, left, right, left. On the right side, he let go those younger and able to work. On the other side, mothers and small children and the old." At 15, Helga was too young to be a worker. She decided to lie, say that she was 18. "I am not religious, but in that moment I start to pray. I ask God to leave me and my mother together." For whatever reason, the man lifted his finger, snarled at both of them: "Rechts!"

She was led into a room with 500 others to be shaved. "And not only from the head - from everywhere. After that, we couldn't recognise each other. I had a lot of hair, dark blonde, long enough, and I remember my mother finished earlier than me. I was looking for her, I couldn't recognise her - my mother, the same. We were looking for voices." Young SS men stood watching and smiling. "It was very funny for them."

Naked, Helga was ushered into a hut "as big as this room" full of coats, dresses, shoes, and ordered quickly to pick one item of each. She snatched a thin red dress ("I would stand in it for hours in the rain, for roll-calls, the red dye flowing down my leg"), two high-heeled shoes ("right and left, but not a pair") and a long green coat. "I felt happy after I received such a coat, so cold were we. Such things can make a woman happy."

Happiness is not an emotion very often admitted at Auschwitz. Guileless and largely uncontaminated by retrospective knowledge, Helga's account is vital with these human surprises. Does she remember any laughter during her short stay at Auschwitz? "There was laughter between prisoners. I was all the time with my mother. I was lucky. You had to have somebody." Otherwise, for those on their own, there was the gallows humour of the prisoner who pointed at the smoking crematorium, and told her: "Tomorrow the soot you find on your nose will be mine."

Helga was in Auschwitz 10 days, not long enough to be tattooed, but long enough to have seared into her memory the number 54391, which she had to call out at every roll-call. She can still only utter it in German: "Vier und fünfzig drei hundert ein und neunzig."

An SS man called Beck was in charge at the end. "He knew the transport we were on was destined for the gas chamber at Mauthausen. He could have left us somewhere on the way, but it was his duty to bring us to death, and that's what he did." She recalls the last morning at Mauthausen, on 5 May 1945. "Up until then, we were watched from all sides and corners. But on that morning they ran away, threw off their uniforms, dressed in civilian clothes and ran."

Interestingly, the first word that Helga heard murmured was "peace" rather than freedom. "It is war and peace. War is over. It is peace. And inside peace is freedom, the end of hunger, the finish of cruelty. But peace was not such a wonderful thing. It came too late and we were too sick. We were glad it was over, but my first thought was for my father: we survived, but did he?"

She often thought she saw him in the street. There and in dreams. "I always saw him walking and coming towards me. It lasted a whole year." Probably he had died on the very day he left Terezín, at Auschwitz. "I hope he didn't know until that moment. I hope it was over quickly."

The war over, she returned with her mother to Prague, and eventually to their fourth-floor apartment, where in July 1945 her uncle Josef turned up with Helga's drawings and two yellow notebooks of diaries. Entrusted with them on the eve of her transportation to Auschwitz, he had bricked the whole lot into a wall in his barracks at Terezín.

Helga started to write after rereading the Terezín entries, continuing from where she broke off. "I needed to get it out of me. It was still inside me. That's why I wrote it in the present. That's why when I speak about it, I am present. It is still present" - as very much is her father. "I am still in touch with him. In many situations, I ask him what he would say, what he would do, and I remember his words, everything he taught."

Her best friend at Terezín wrote in Helga's journal: "Forget the hours of suffering, but never the lessons they taught you."

"The value of life. That people have to be kind to each other.

And never to throw away food or clothes. I saw some shoes in the street the other day, and I remember how shoes or a piece of bread would save somebody's life. And very often if I have difficulty climbing the steps to the fourth floor, in my thoughts I see the steps in the quarry at Mauthausen, and the prisoners who had to climb to the top, carrying a rock - and then I am able to climb the steps."

In the course of a six-hour conversation, we cover her postwar life: her marriage to a Roman Catholic, Jirí Hosek, a musician in the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra; her decision to become an artist, despite being refused a place at the Decorative School of Arts because the new authorities judged her paintings "too pessimistic"; her endurance of a Communist regime in certain ways just as frightful and anti-Jewish as that of the Nazis. While I am with her, Helga's mobile phone rings twice. One caller is Lisa, 91, who was at Freiberg with her, one of 20 survivors who keep in touch by Skype and meet up in the mountains every year, at a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn, to talk about the camps.

The second call is from her granddaughter, the cellist, with news that her six-month-old daughter Adina has broken her first tooth.

Energised, Helga smiles at me: "At this moment, I am happy. Isn't it a wonder, after all, to have been granted to a few of us the chance of giving birth? And our children are now older than our parents were, and I'm a great-grandmother."

Read an exclusive extract from Helga's Diary

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Helga Weiss: an interview with a holocaust survivor

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Helga Weiss was transported to Terezín concentration camp at the age of 12. She tells Nicholas Shakespeare how she came to write - and draw - the most moving child's-eye testimony since the diary of Anne Frank. At Helga Weiss's first concentration camp, a boy of her age, 14, wrote a poem she has never forgotten.

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Helga expains, "This is my duty... to tell the story for as long as I am able. We are very few now. I am one of the youngest. One of the children. We still call ourselves the girls from 24 because that was the number of our room at Terezín. But now the girls are all over 80. In a few years there will be nobody left. And so we try to leave something behind." She doesn't seem like she did much, but she is the justice for all those who died, and she gets to share the stories.

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Helga and her mother were never separated during the entirety of the Holocaust. It was a miracle for them. They both returned home together. It was hard to restart for them, they had to begin a new life in a way. People were surprised and happy at their return. Helga found her way to live after this monstrosity, and stayed by her mothers side until she died. Helga became known as an artist and now sells her diary from the Holocaust. She lives in her childhood home, now 88 years old.