A concentration camp survivor and former member of the Belgian resistance is being helped to write her memoirs by a Portsmouth basic skills lecturer.

Eighty-one year old Irene Loveless from Hilsea in Portsmouth almost died of dysentery and pneumonia in Ravensbrueck concentration camp in 1943.

Her body had been dumped on top of a pile of corpses ready to be taken to the crematorium, then a Belgian nurse spotted one of her hands twitching.

As a forced labourer Ms Loveless’s job had been to help dispose of the bodies of her fellow inmates at the German camp. The corpses were lying around the camp in piles. Ukrainian women would heap them onto a handcart and Ms Loveless would take them off the cart and throw them on to a conveyor belt going to the crematorium.

The daughter of a Belgian mother and an English father, she was a British national living in Belgium at the time of the German invasion. After being interned as an enemy alien for two years, she was released. On returning to her home in Li ge, Belgium, she joined the resistance.

While pretending to be a dressmaker, she worked under cover-helping shot down British airmen find shelter and return to England.

She also noted down train cargoes and destinations at railway stations and passed on details to saboteurs who would then blow up the trains. She monitored radio broadcasts for instructions from London.

Betrayed by a neighbour to the Gestapo, she was interrogated and kept in solitary confinement for two weeks before being sent to the Ravensbrueck camp as a labourer. After a year she was transferred to Mauthausen camp in Austria before being freed in 1945 when the camp was liberated.

When she was released she weighed just six stone and was suffering from dropsy - her legs were very swollen. After recuperating in Switzerland, she came to England, which had been her home until she moved to Belgium at the age of nine.

The summer before last Ms Loveless - whose first language is French - enrolled on a 10-week spelling course at Highbury College, Portsmouth. It was here that her remarkable story came to the attention of her tutor Sally Read.

In 1948 Ms Loveless had prepared a typescript of her wartime experiences. After showing the tutor the by now grubby manuscript written in very peculiar English, Ms Read suggested they work together to record her experiences. This is now almost complete and they are hoping to find a publisher.

Ms Read describes Ms Loveless as a “powerful lady, very intelligent, very strong. You can just imagine her being in the resistance. She would not have stood for anything.

“She is an extremely forward-looking person. She seems to have got the gift of accommodating her past and still managing to look forward, which is quite remarkable. She is very positive. She acknowledges that there were terrible times. I have been with her sometimes when she has just sat there and cried but she always bounces back.

“Irene is a woman of undaunted spirit and quick intelligence, who has never lost her wit and determination in spite of enormous trouble and suffering. Her unflagging courage has brought her through.”

After her spelling course at Highbury College’s Compass Centre, which helps people with their basic skills, Ms Loveless went on to take a literacy through information technology course and she is now working towards a City amp; Guilds award in literacy. Ms Read said that Irene has proved to be a conscientious and perceptive student, who never fails to bring a humorous note to her classes.