"The Germans first killed my brother and then the whole family one by one… How could this ever have happened?” wonders Alicia Melamed Adams, more than 75 years later.

The 92-year-old Polish artist, who lives in East Finchley with her Holocaust survivor husband Adam, 96, cannot watch anything about the Shoah. Instead, the memories are etched on her canvases and seared in her brain.

“We didn’t even think about marrying anyone else, we didn’t have any family, there was no other world than ours…” says Adam. “We both did not want to be alone and that drew us together,” adds Alicia.

Born in 1927, Alicia (then Goldschlag) Melamed Adams enjoyed a happy, peaceful childhood in Boryslav, Eastern Poland, among the local farming community. Her father was an oil-mine engineer; her mother was a designer; and her older brother, Josef, dreamed of becoming an architect.

After the Nazis invaded, Josef was made to work at a brick factory before being taken to the notorious Janowska concentration camp in Lvov, “where he disappeared without a trace”.

Melamed Adams and her parents were taken to work in Beskiden concentration camp in Boryslaw, near Drohobycz, where the teenager was made to carry bricks for the Gestapo.

On July 24 1943, her father’s birthday, Melamed Adams, her parents and other Jews were sent to a local prison. “For three days they kept us without food and later they took people in lorries to Bronica Woods, where they were shot in front of prepared mass graves,” she recalls. “I looked through the bars of the windows and life seemed so desirable. I was only 15 and I didn’t want to die.”

Her life was saved thanks to her childhood friend Poldek Weiss, whose father was a tailor for the Gestapo. On her way to prison he told her he would beg his father to help. On the third day the Gestapo chief came in calling for “Alicia Weiss,” thinking she was the wife of Poldek.

As her mother pushed her out, she handed over her coat, into which her diamond engagement ring had been sewn, later used to pay a non-Jew to hide her and others. Her parents were murdered the next day.

All but an estimated 400 of the 20,000 Jews in Drohobycz and the surrounding areas were murdered.

Alicia’s husband, Adam, was born Israel Natan Melamed in Lublin in 1923, the son of a wealthy textile merchant. Although not Orthodox, his family were very Zionist, and by the age of 14 Adams was fluent in Hebrew.

In September 1939 the Germans arrived in Lublin, and his family were given five minutes to leave their home. Adams and his father tried to flee to Russia but were caught and imprisoned in Lublin Castle for a year, where they were beaten and starved. They were then sent to the Lublin ghetto. On the night of the liquidation of about 10,000 Jews, Adams lost his parents, his three sisters and all his family.

His life became a nightmare — on the run, hiding wherever he could, always fearful of a night-time Nazi search “Aktion”. His survival of ghettos, prisons and camps was down to resilience, stealth and luck.

Adams was caught and twice sent to Lipowa camp. There, the commander enjoyed lining ten men against a wall and shooting them. Adams formed part of one of these line-ups, but was saved at the last minute by his doctor brother-in-law who worked there. The second time he ran away and ended up back in the Lublin ghetto.

Towards the end of the war he spent eight months in a tiny hole under the veranda of the Lublin home of a non-Jewish woman, Mrs Cekalska, with his friend Julian. “For the first three days we cried bitterly for our families... We lived in complete darkness, eaten by lice … unwashed, unclean, suffering terrible hunger and terrible fear of being discovered.” Years later, Mrs Cekalska was named a Righteous Among the Nations.

Alicia and Adam met after the war. They married in Warsaw and moved to Paris before settling in London in 1950. In 1951, their son, Charles, was born.

In those days they received no help in dealing with their trauma. Adam barely spoke about his wartime suffering, but focused on creating “the best life” he could for his family, by becoming a successful manufacturer. Alicia trained to be an artist at St Martin’s School of Art, and used painting as a way of processing her feelings. Selected Holocaust works by her are in the collections of the Imperial War Museum and the Ben Uri.

It took around 50 years for Adam to talk. “I haven’t recuperated from my Holocaust,” he says. “I can’t tear it out from me. I want to listen and read about everything.

“We look at life very differently. I look and live in the past and Alicia tries to cut it out, but feels it and is still afraid of it.” Alicia says: “No-one who did not survive it can ever understand it.”

Alicia will feature in ‘Inside Out’ on BBC 1 on January 27 at 7.30pm