Kitty Hart-Moxon, OBE (born December 1, 1926) is a Polish-British 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, 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).
Hart-Moxon was born Kitty Felix, on 1 December 1926,[1] in the southern Polish town of Bielsko (known as Bielitz in German), which bordered both Germany and Czechoslovakia. She was the second child of Karol Felix and his wife Lola Rosa Felix, who had a son five years Kitty's senior, named Robert. Karol Felix (born c. 1888) had studied law in Vienna, and had also been a captain in the Austrian army in the First World War. Upon his father's death, he took over his agricultural supply business, which he ran with his sister, until the outbreak of the war. Lola's father was also in the agricultural business: he was a farmer, who owned his own land, and Kitty believes that this may have been how her parents met—with Lola's father potentially using Karol as a supplier. Kitty's paternal family had come from Italy hundreds of years ago—it had been said that one of her ancestors had been called to attend to the King of Poland, as he was a doctor, and that is how the family came to reside in Poland. Her mother was born on 18 February 1890, to a Slovakian father and his wife. Lola's sister had studied medicine in Vienna, and Lola herself went to England in 1911 to study English at Bedford College, London—eventually becoming an English teacher in Poland, where she taught children preparing for their state examinations (this meant it was an advanced level of English learning).
Prior to the end of the First World War, Poland had been partitioned into three parts, with each part belonging to either Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, or the Russian Empire; the town of Bielsko belonged to Austria-Hungary. The majority of Austro-Hungarians were German speakers, and due to the fact Bielsko belonged to Austria-Hungary, many of its residents were German speakers, including Kitty's parents, and as a result of this, the Felix family spoke German at home, with Kitty not learning a word of Polish until she began attending school. Kitty also began learning basic English in nursery, where her mother—who was teaching at the nursery at the time—taught the children English nursery rhymes.
Growing up, Kitty was extremely sporty, and participated in gymnastics, athletics, swimming, and skiing. Meanwhile, both her parents, and her brother, enjoyed ballroom dancing. Her parents also enjoyed socialising: they had a wide circle of Jewish friends, with whom they frequently went out. The family led quite a prosperous lifestyle: they travelled a lot; employed domestic staff; lived in comfortable accommodation; could afford to send Kitty to private school; and had lavish birthday celebrations—even including parties on ice.
Lola and Karol Felix were liberal Jews: they did not observe Jewish customs, including not keeping a kosher home (in fact, Kitty states that she did not even know what kosher was until after her family had fled to Lublin); and the family only attended synagogue at occasions. Despite this, they were very much a part of the Jewish community: the majority of people the family mixed with were Jews, with Kitty herself frequenting Jewish social clubs. Additionally, Kitty also attended a Jewish primary school, and following this, was a pupil at the Convent School of Notre Dame for a year (after which the war broke out), which although not a Jewish school, was predominantly attended by Jews. The school was a private all-girls school, and people came from miles around to attend it, as it was very prestigious, with alumni including a set of twins who were descended from the Habsburg dynasty.
Kitty has stated that growing up, she was completely oblivious to the political situation in both Poland, and wider Europe, including Hitler's rise to power. One thing she does recall from her youth however, is a girl joining her school who stated that she and her family had been expelled from Germany for being Jews.
In late August 1939, while on holiday in the mountains with her mother, Kitty went canoeing, and ended up disappearing down the river. After realising her daughter was missing, Lola informed the police, who began searching for her. Eventually, Kitty returned with her canoe by train, and found her mother in a frantic state—not only because of her daughter's disappearance, but because she had received a phone call from Karol telling them they must return home straight away. Kitty's brother, Robert, was also on holiday with his friends at the time, and was too summoned home. Arriving home to find that Karol had packed up all their possessions, her father sent Kitty and her mother to board the train to Lublin straight away (she had not known at the time, but already the Germans had placed machine guns on the rooftops of the town, and had been shooting at citizens). Two days later (still prior to the Nazis' invasion of Poland on 1 September), Karol and Robert joined them in Lublin; the two had managed to board one of the last trains out of the town, with the remaining citizens being forced to flee by foot—it later transpired that many of these people were eventually gunned down in their attempts to escape, when the invading forces caught up with them. Karol had arranged for the family's possessions to be sent on to Lublin by train, however they never arrived, due to the fact that the train had been bombed. Kitty considers the family's flight from Bielsko the first time she felt the effects of the war.
On 1 September 1939, the Nazis 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 spring of 1941, 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.[2]
The family returned to the vicarage of Father Krasowski, where her father bribed some officials and obtained false documents for her and her mother.[3] With these passports, birth, and identity cards, the two were smuggled onto a train of Polish forced labourers 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.[2]
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."[4] 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.[2]
Auschwitz II (Birkenau)
On 6 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; she is of the opinion that the typhus immunisation that her father managed to arrange in the Lublin Ghetto may have been responsible for her recovery. 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 saw the commandant walking and ran to him and deferentially requested that her daughter be allowed to leave the camp with her. The commandant obliged. Kitty has stated it was probably due to her mother's perfect respectful formal spoken German. So, in November 1944, Kitty was taken along with several hundred prisoners to Gross-Rosen concentration camp.[2] Every day, the camp occupants were marched to a nearby town to work in the Philips electronic factory.
In Sied 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".[5] 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.[2]
In Porta Westfalica, the prisoners were sent to work in an underground factory.
Liberation
After a time in Porta Westfalica, Kitty and her mother were 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. After liberation, Kitty and her mother began working as translators for the British Army. Later, the two moved to help with the Quaker Relief Team, staying in a displaced persons camp outside Braunschweig.[2]
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 was murdered in the gas chambers.[2]
After the war
In September 1946, Kitty emigrated with her mother to Birmingham, England to live with her mother's sister, who had resided there since 1938. In 1949, she married Polish emigre Rudi Hart, an upholsterer, who had arrived in England through the Kindertransport programme. They had two sons, David and Peter. Kitty divorced her first husband, and by 1992, she married Phillip Moxon. Together, they continued her Holocaust work.
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 in 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.[6] 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.[7] 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."[8]
The resulting documentary, Kitty: Return to Auschwitz, won international awards[9] and was seen by millions. She began to receive mail by the sackful, some arriving addressed only to "Kitty, Birmingham".[10] The documentary inspired her second autobiography, titled Return To Auschwitz.[11] 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.[12]
In 2014, Kitty participated in a documentary resulting in her taking a new generation to Auschwitz telling of her experience. That year was her last trip to the camp. The documentary was called: “One Day In Auschwitz”.
In 2016, Kitty spoke to the Auschwitz Study Group about her time in Auschwitz and also rejected unequivocally the story of Denis Avey who claimed to have escaped from Auschwitz.[15]
Apart from her work for Holocaust survivors and victims, she also worked as a radiographer. In March 1947, she began studies 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.
Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution", the overall Nazi effort to complete the genocide of all European Jews. Before Germany's defeat put an end to this project more than six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust. The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 500 m (1,600 ft) south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.
Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.
Bielsko was until 1950 an independent town situated in Cieszyn Silesia, Poland. In 1951 it was joined with Biała Krakowska to form the new town of Bielsko-Biała. Bielsko constitutes the western part of that town.
The Auschwitz Album is a photographic record of the Holocaust during the Second World War. It and the Sonderkommando photographs are among the small number of visual documents that show the operations of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the German extermination camp in occupied Poland.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Olga Horak is a Czechoslovakian-born Australian author and Holocaust survivor.
Gerda Weissmann Klein was a Polish-born American writer and human rights activist. Her autobiographical account of the Holocaust, All But My Life (1957), was adapted for the 1995 short film, One Survivor Remembers, which received an Academy Award and an Emmy Award, and was selected for the National Film Registry. She married Kurt Klein (1920–2002) in 1946.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is a German-British cellist, and a surviving member of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz.
Livia Bitton-Jackson was an author and a Holocaust survivor. She was born as Elli L. Friedmann in Samorin, Czechoslovakia, She was 13 years old when she, her mother, father, aunt and brother Bubi, were taken to Ghetto Nagymagyar. Eventually, they were transported to Auschwitz, the largest German concentration camp, where her brother and aunt were separated from Livia and her mother. Her aunt perished but her brother survived. She, her mother and brother were liberated in 1945. Bitton-Jackson came to the U.S. on a refugee boat in 1951 to join Bubi, who was studying in New York. She then studied at New York University, from which she received a Ph.D. in Hebrew Culture and Jewish History. She also wrote her 1997 memoir I Have Lived a Thousand Years.
Oskar Gröning was a German SS Unterscharführer who was stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. His responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners, and he was in charge of the personal property of arriving prisoners. On a few occasions he witnessed the procedures of mass killing in the camp. After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning surrendered to the British at the end of the war; his role in the SS was not discovered. He was eventually transferred to the UK as a prisoner of war and worked as a farm labourer.
Eddie Hellmuth Willner was a German Jew, a US Army major, and a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
During the Holocaust, death marches were massive forced transfers of prisoners from one Nazi camp to other locations, which involved walking long distances resulting in numerous deaths of weakened people. Most death marches took place toward the end of World War II, mostly after the summer/autumn of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi camps near the Eastern Front were moved to camps inside Germany away from the Allied forces. Their purpose was to continue the use of prisoners' slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to keep the prisoners from bargaining with the Allies.
The Auschwitz Study Group (ASG) are a team of collective researchers and archivists founded by English researcher Michael Challoner. The ASG have spent several years studying all facets and complexities of Auschwitz and post war Oświęcim, often providing original work for media and production companies.
Solomon Radasky was a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, on May 17, 1910, but grew up in the city smaller city of Praga, near the Vistula river. While in Poland before World War II, Radasky owned a small tailor shop where he made fur coats for a living. His life was much like many Polish citizens until the Holocaust in 1941. He and his direct family, like many victimes of the Holocaust, were of Jewish heritage. As the lone survivor of his family of 78 people, he later in life shared his account with historians of how he was able to survive many multiple camps of the worst concentration camps including Auschwitz, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, and the Warsaw Ghetto.
Angela Orosz-Richt is a Holocaust survivor. Of several thousand babies born at the Auschwitz complex, she is one of the few who survived to liberation. Her testimony has led to the 21st century convictions of two former Nazis.
Eva Olga Clarke is a British-Czech Holocaust survivor and former college administrator known for her birth at Mauthausen concentration camp. She is a speaker for the Holocaust Educational Trust. Clarke combats modern day instances of racism and prejudice through sharing her family's experiences in the Holocaust.
Tova Friedman is a Polish American therapist, social worker, author, and academic. She is a Holocaust survivor who was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Friedman taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later served as the director of the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties.
Lilly Appelbaum Malnik is a Belgian-American Holocaust survivor who helped create the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was captured by Nazi soldiers in 1944, during the German occupation of Belgium, and was imprisoned at the Mechelen transit camp in Belgium, Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 by the British Army. Malnik's mother, two siblings, aunt and uncle, and grandaunt and granduncle were all killed during The Holocaust in Belgium. After World War II, she emigrated to the United States and was reunited with her father. She married Abraham Malnik, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, and they assisted in the founding of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With her granddaughter, the American social media content creator Miriam Ezagui, Malnik has made TikTok videos detailing life in concentration camps.
↑ Morley, Peter Morley (2010). Peter Morley: A Life Rewound(PDF) (Abridgeded.). British Academy of Film and Television Arts. p.10. Archived from the original(PDF) on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 29 September 2011.
"Testimony"(PDF). Survival: Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Story. reprinted at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Archived from the original(PDF) on 21 July 2011.
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