"Instead, we were sentenced to life imprisonment in Auschwitz. "We were prepared to die there, but it turned out to be a mock execution." It was a piece of Nazi cruelty: the guards fired shots into the air. But in March 1943, Kitty, her mother and 12 other women suspected of being Jewish were betrayed and later sentenced to death by firing squad. Kitty and her mother posed as Polish forced labourers and were transported to Bitterfeld within Germany to work in a munitions plant. They had to split up to maximise their chances of survival. After many attempts, the family escaped and obtained non-Jewish documents. A few days prior to Hitler's invasion on 1 September 1939, Kitty's family fled eastward to elude the Wehrmacht but were overtaken by the Nazis and became trapped in the Lublin ghetto. She was educated by nuns and was oblivious to antisemitism until she and her Jewish swimming team were stoned during a competition. She recalls a blissful sporty childhood with her brother Robert – hiking in the mountains in summer and skiing in winter. She was born Kitty Felix in 1926 in Bielsko, a Polish town where Jews, Czechs, Poles and Germans mixed. In 2003 she received the OBE for her work on Holocaust education Kitty, a retired radiographer, has been speaking for decades in schools, colleges, universities to all who are prepared to listen. She also has made award-winning films about her return to the death camp and about her time after Auschwitz. My mother and I sorted ourselves out by countless discussions about what had happened to us." Kitty wrote two books about her experiences: I Am Alive (1961) and Return to Auschwitz (1981). I don't want to know.' My mother and I became very angry at being silenced."ĭid you ever receive counselling? Kitty favours me with a justifiable sardonic look as we sit in her living room in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. "He said: 'I don't want you to talk about anything that happened to you. She and her mother had arrived at Dover in late 1946 to be met by her uncle, the husband of her mother's sister. What was worse was that no one wanted to know. They found it impossible to comprehend that there was massacre on a huge scale, that thousands were murdered deliberately."
But they could not get their heads round it. "If I did say what happened to me and my mother, people would say: 'That sounds far fetched.' I would explain that I saw thousands walk into a gas chamber and never come out. I n Birmingham, after the war, people would ask Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon about the tattoo on her forearm: "Is that your boyfriend's telephone number?" "People simply knew nothing," says Kitty.