On January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day, people around the world will stop to remember the six million Jewish men, women and children who perished in the ghettos, mass shootings, extermination camps and concentration camps of World War Two, as the Nazis attempted to annihilate all the Jews of Europe between 1941 and 1945.

Two of the best-known accounts of the Holocaust are If This is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist and writer who was a prisoner in Auschwitz for a year.

Artist Jane Joseph remembers reading the books in 1998 and then reading them both again immediately, they had such an impact on her.

The following year, she was commissioned by the Folio Society to make a series of etchings for their special edition of If This is a Man – a prospect that was both delightful and daunting.

“It came quite out of the blue,“ remembers the 71-year-old. “They said I was to choose what parts of the text to illustrate myself, it was an open brief. I’m not an illustrator, I’m a painter, so I just did whatever ideas came into my head.

“But it’s such a fine, important book that in many ways it was quite an embarrassing commission to have because I didn’t want to insult the book.“

Jane, whose 39 etchings for If This is a Man and The Truce are on display in an exhibition at the London Jewish Cultural Centre from next week, decided to focus mainly, although not solely, on the more affirmative aspects of both books, and has produced works of a water tap, flowers, bridges, natural scenes, and Russian soldiers arriving on horseback to liberate the camp.

“The first thing I had to think was that he survived,“ she says, “and he wrote the books as a survivor. The books are full of ghastly things that we now, in our society, just can’t imagine.

“He killed himself later on, but I had to approach the project from the point of view when he wrote them, and there is so much in them that is quite extraordinary and uplifting in many ways, and those are the ideas I’ve tried to save.“

  • Etchings for Primo Levi is at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, Ivy House, North End Road, Golders Green from January 13 to February 20. Details: 020 8457 5000, ljcc.org.uk