The PM met two surviving recipients - Sir Nicholas Winton and Denis Avey - at a reception at Downing Street on Tuesday.

And he praised the role of 26 others in saving the lives of those persecuted by the Nazis.

Bury South MP Ivan Lewis hosted a lunch for award winners and their families at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Britain has also minted a new Hero of the Holocaust medal.

The 100-year-old Winton organised the rescue of 669 mainly Jewish children by train from Prague in 1939, before the outbreak of war.

Many of their parents were later killed.

Avey, 91, says he switched places with a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz to gather information about the camp, and helped a fellow inmate to survive by sharing food.

"These individuals are true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us, Mr Brown said.

"They were shining beacons of hope in the midst of terrible evil because they were prepared to take a stand against prejudice, hatred and intolerance."

During a visit to Auschwitz last year, Brown promised to honour the group.

There were posthumous awards for a group of British prisoners of war who saved the life of 15-year-old Hannah Sara Rigler by hiding her in a hayloft and secretly taking food to her.

She escaped the death march outside Gdansk, Poland, but her mother and sister perished

Rigler, who lives in New York, wrote an account of her rescue called 10 British Prisoners of War Saved My Life.

Other Britons who made a difference include June Ravenhall, a British housewife living in Holland who sheltered a young Jewish man even after her husband had been taken to a concentration camp and Jane Haining from Dunscore in Scotland - who was sent to Auschwitz after caring for 400 Jewish girls in occupied Hungary - and Bertha Bracey, a Quaker woman, lobbied the British government during the 1930s to accept persecuted Jewish refugees.

Her efforts established the Kindertransport which took an estimated 10,000 mainly Jewish children from mainland Europe to Britain.

Princess Alice of Greece, the Duke of Edinburgh's mother, was also among those honoured.

She worked to organise shelters for orphan children and sheltered three Jewish women when Greece was occupied by the Nazis.