Kitty Hart-Moxon

Kitty Hart-Moxon, OBE (born December 1, 1926) is a Polish-English Holocaust survivor. She was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1943 at age 16, where she survived for two years, and was also imprisoned at other camps. Shortly after her liberation in April 1945 by American soldiers, she moved to England with her mother, where she married and dedicated her life to raising awareness of the Holocaust. She has written two autobiographies entitled I am Alive (1961) and Return to Auschwitz (1981).

Early life

Kitty Hart-Moxon was born Kitty Felix, in December 1, 1926, in the southern Polish town of Bielsko. She had one brother, Robert, who was five years older. Her father operated an agricultural supply business.

As a child, Kitty represented Poland as part of the Youth Swimming Team in 1939. She won a bronze medal and was the youngest selected on the squad.

During a holiday when Kitty was 12, her parents decided to leave Bielsko because of its proximity to the German and Czechoslovakian borders. The house was emptied in response to the anti-Semitic mood which had swept the town. To escape the danger of proximity to Germany, Kitty’s family moved to Lublin, in central Poland. They left on 24 August 1939. Kitty refers to these events in the opening chapter of her first autobiographical book, I Am Alive. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Ghettos

The conditions for Jews living in Lublin deteriorated after the invasion. Eventually, all the Jews in Lublin were moved into a single area of the city, creating the Lublin Ghetto. In the winter of 1940-41, the family attempted to escape to Russia. They made it to the border but found that it had closed 24 hours previously. They attempted to cross the frozen river by sleigh but were sighted when they were about three-quarters of the way across and shot at. Forced to return to the Polish side of the river, they abandoned their escape attempt and returned towards Lublin.

The family returned to the vicarage of Father Krasowski, where her father bribed some officials and obtained false documents for her and her mother. With these passports, birth certificates, and identity cards, the two were smuggled onto a train of Polish workers bound for Germany. The family split up to increase their chance of survival. Kitty went with her mother to I.G. Farben in Bitterfeld and commenced working at a rubber factory.

On 13 March 1943, Kitty and 12 other Jews at the factory, including her mother, were betrayed and taken to Gestapo headquarters. The family members were interrogated and charged at trial three days later with "endangering the security of Third Reich" and "illegally [entering] Germany with forged papers". They were told they would be executed and placed in front of a firing squad. After the squad conducted a mock execution, the victims were told their sentences had been commuted to hard labour.

Auschwitz II (Birkenau)

On 2 April 1943, when Kitty was 16, she and her mother arrived at Auschwitz. They found jobs working with dead prisoners, which was less physically demanding than jobs outside the camp. To aid in their survival, they took items from the dead, and traded those and other items with other prisoners. At one point, Kitty became ill with typhus, but she eventually recovered. Throughout their imprisonment, Kitty maintained a variety of jobs, including that of night shift worker responsible for sorting through the confiscated possessions of prisoners arriving by train.

Rumours began in August 1944 that Auschwitz was to be evacuated. Kitty's mother was selected as one of 100 prisoners to be removed from the camp. She requested that her daughter be allowed to leave the camp. The commandant, for unknown reasons, obliged. So, in November 1944, Kitty was taken along with several hundred prisoners to Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Every day, the camp occupants were marched to a nearby town to work in the Philips electronic factory.

The death marches

After four months, in response to advances by the Allied Forces, the prisoners of Gross Rosen were forced on what would later be called a death march across the Sudeten mountains. These prisoners were chosen to be moved, rather than executed, because Albert Speer, the German armaments minister, believed the special skills these prisoners had gained at the Phillips factory would be useful in other German factories for the manufacture of "jamming transmitters and equipment for high-performance aircraft". The prisoners were eventually taken to a train station and shipped across Europe to Porta Westfalica in northwestern Germany. Only about 200 of the original 10,000 prisoners, including Kitty and her mother, survived the journey.

In Porta Westfalica, the prisoners were sent to work in an underground factory. From there, Kitty and her mother were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen, at which point they were abandoned in a locked train car and left to die. After being released by a group of German soldiers, they were transported to a camp near Salzwedel.

Liberation

In the second week of April 1945, the SS guards disappeared from the camp. On Saturday, 14 April, Salzwedel was liberated by the American army. Kitty and her mother began working as translators for the British Army. Later, the two moved to help with the Quaker Relief Team, outside Braunschweig (Brunswick).

Kitty and her mother tried to locate their family members soon after they were liberated but found that everyone else had been killed: her father had been discovered by the Gestapo and shot; her brother was killed in battle; and her grandmother was taken to Belzec concentration camp and died in the gas chambers.

After the war

In 1946, Kitty emigrated with her mother to England to live with her uncle who had resided there since before World War II. In 1949, she married Rudi Hart, an upholsterer, who had escaped to England before being caught in the Holocaust. They had two sons, David and Peter.

While in England, Kitty Hart-Moxon became interested in educating people about the Holocaust by telling her life story to the public. This began with her first book I Am Alive (1961) (see References); this is an account of her life from the day in 1939 when, while away on holiday with her mother, they received a telegram from her father insisting they return at once, through the events that led to her incarceration in Auschwitz in 1942, to her liberation from Auschwitz on 13 April 1945. Then, in 1978, Yorkshire Television (YTV) producer Peter Morley's team learned about Hart-Moxon while doing background research on a project about women who risked their lives to save others during the Nazi era, and convinced him to meet her. She didn't fit the parameters they'd set for Women of Courage, but after two visits, Morley was so impressed with Hart-Moxon, he submitted a proposal to YTV to accompany her to Auschwitz for her first visit in 33 years and film it, provided she brought along her eldest son, then a young doctor, for emotional support. In his memoirs, Morley wrote, "This, no doubt, was going to be a very raw film... I felt this to be a unique opportunity to add fresh insight to the infamy of Auschwitz as had been portrayed in both fictional and non-fictional films and television programmes."

The resulting documentary, Kitty: Return to Auschwitz, won international awards and was seen by millions. She began to receive mail by the sackful, some arriving addressed only to "Kitty, Birmingham". The documentary inspired her second autobiography, titled Return To Auschwitz. She later worked with the BBC to make a second documentary, titled Death March: A Survivor's Story (2003), in which she retraced the death march from Auschwitz-Birkenau back to Germany.

In 1998, Hart-Moxon gave her testimony to USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education. Her testimony lives in the Visual History Archive, accessible to teachers and students around the world.

Apart from her work for Holocaust survivors and victims, she also worked as a nurse. She studied through a private nurse training course and at the Birmingham Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, after which she obtained a job at a private radiology firm. Later she helped her husband set up his own upholstery business.

Honours

In the 2003 Queen's Birthday Honours, Hart-Moxon was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services relating to Holocaust education. In 2013, Kitty Hart-Moxon was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Birmingham.

External links

• Imperial War Museum Interview from 1996
• Imperial War Museum Interview from 1999