When Natalia Karp returned to her native Poland as a bewildered, emaciated, yet defiant survivor of Auschwitz as the war ended in 1945, one of her first thoughts was to find herself a piano. She had been a child prodigy in the 1920s, and was to become an accomplished and popular soloist and chamber musician in her long London-based career after the war. But in between she had had to cling to her musical talent amid huge upheaval and suffering for herself and her Jewish community as war approached and then broke out, and Nazi persecution of the Jews intensified.

There had often been little thought of music amid the horrors of concentration camp life, though in one extraordinary moment her talent appeared to save her life as she played for a camp commandant. But then, while working to assist postwar orphans in Cracow, she retrieved an instrument from a bombed house and began practising the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto “because it needs a lot of strength”, she remembered telling herself: “And I must show them that they didn’t defeat me, they didn’t get me down – I am stronger than them.”

Within a few months she was playing the concerto with the Cracow Philharmonic in a performance broadcast on Polish radio and after moving to London in 1947 she rapidly established an international reputation.

It was a career she might confidently have expected to begin nearly two decades previously, when she had made her debut in 1929 as an 18-year-old soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic. She had been born as Natalia Weissman and brought up in Cracow where her mother was a keen musician and her businessman father loved art. “The house dripped with European culture,” she recalled, and Cracow itself had a rich cultural life, though with very little mixing between Jews and nonJews. Interwar Poland was never an entirely comfortable place, and she witnessed antiSemitic pogroms.

As her musical talent became apparent she was sent to Berlin for tuition by the renowned Artur Schnabel and her 1929 debut there was praised widely. However, immediately afterwards she had to return to Poland to care for her gravely ill mother, who died soon afterwards, and she remained at home to look after her brother and sister. In 1930 she married a lawyer, Julius Huber, who disapproved of her pursuing a performing career. “You’re a good pianist,” he told her, “but sit at home.”

Home, however, was to become a perilous place as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Her husband headed off to try to join the Polish Army and disappeared – she only learnt after the war that he had been killed in a bombing raid. As the persecution and deportation of Jews increased she moved to Tarnow, hoping it would be safer, but in 1941 she was arrested and beaten up by the Gestapo and saw the massacre of 15,000 Jews in the town. After helping other Jews to hide to escape deportation, she made her way to Warsaw in 1943 and then tried to leave Poland via Slovakia. But she was picked up by the Polish police who handed her over to the Gestapo.

She was sent in December 1943 to the Plaszow concentration camp near Cracow, having heard all the rumours of what such camps meant, and little expecting to survive. The camp had been built on a Jewish cemetery, with the gravestones used by the Germans to build aroad. Thecamp and its especially sadistic commander Amon Goeth were featured decades later in Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List. And in a moment that had all the qualities of an epic drama, Natalia was brought to Goeth’s residence on her arrival, as it happened to be his birthday party and he had heard that a talented musician was now among his prisoners.

He asked her to play. She remembered thinking that she had not played properly for several years. “I can remember being prepared for the party,” she recalled in an interview for The Times in 1967. “While I was being made up and dressed in pretty clothes others were screaming from beatings. Then I was brought before the commandant’s group. He was a huge man with a cruel face. He was wearing a white dinner jacket. It was so macabre.”

She played a Chopin nocturne. Goeth decreed after her performance that she should be allowed to live, and she persuaded him to spare her sister too. But there followed months of horrific life amid the cold, hunger and trauma of camp life, both in Plaszow and later in Auschwitz, listening to the screams of children separated from their parents as they were taken away to be murdered, wondering daily whether she too would be “selected” for death and praying, at times, that the Allies would bomb the camp and end their misery.

As the Red Army approached from the east she was moved towards the end of the war to a camp in the Sudetenland in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, from where the Germans guards suddenly melted away. Once again she went in search of a piano as well as food and played for Russian officers when they arrived, helping to spare her from the bestial treatment meted out to many women by Russian troops.

She finally made her way home: “One was walking in the streets like in a strange place because before the war Cracow had had 65,000 Jews . . . so when you went out to town you met people you knew all the time. But now you didn’t meet anybody.” Anguish at the number of her family members who had perished was followed by feelings of guilt at her survival. “I was questioning why me and not the others.”

She remarried. Her new husband was a Polish diplomat, Josef Karpf, and she went with him when he was posted to London in 1947. The couple remained permanently, claiming political asylum in Britain as communist rule tightened in Warsaw.

Life was hard for some time. They had little to live on and she had to face indifference and ignorance regarding her wartime suffering, not only from the British as a whole but even from the established Jewish community in Britain. She changed her name from Karpf to Karp, partly in exasperation at local inability to spell an unfamiliar name.

However, she was delighted to begin her own family. She had two daughters, the second of whom, the journalist Anne Karpf, published in 1996 a moving account of their relationship under the shadow of the Holocaust in The War After – a book which included much vivid first-hand description of Natalia’s experiences.

The appearance of the film Schindler’s List created for a mass audience another image of the Holocaust, some details of which inevitably disturbed her as inaccurate. However, she was delighted that the subject should be brought to prominence given that “there are young people now who do not know what Auschwitz means”.

It was also, as always, her music that brought constant consolation and pleasure in the postwar decades. She broadcast frequently on the BBC and played regularly in London and abroad, including several concert tours of Germany in the early 1950s, after being advised by a Foreign Office official that she should go: “What the politicians spoil, the artists repair.” As well as Beethoven and Schubert, Chopin remained a particular favourite, and critics referred to her “warm and sympathetic musicianship” and “light-fingered gracious style”.

She was still performing into her nineties. The historian Norman Davies, who heard her play at the Polish Embassy in 2003, wrote: “Here she was at 92, the Auschwitz tattoo still visible, playing a lively programme . . . this was the essential, immortal Central Europe.” To those who knew her life story, the Poland she had grown up in and the role music had played in it, such performances had this great poignancy – a reminder of one individual’s extraordinary will to survive and bear witness, but a reminder too of the Holocaust’s appalling cultural as well as human cost.

Her husband Josef died in 1993. She is survived by her two daughters.

Natalia Karp, pianist, was born on February 27, 1911. She died on July 9, 2007, aged 96