Kitty Hart Moxon Story of a Lifetime

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

Auschwitz is a place associated with death and horror.

Kitty Hart-Moxon was a prisoner here

and she's taken me back

to the world's most notorious concentration camp,

where people were taken to be killed.

They were here three days, four days, naked, on bare boards,

waiting their turn into the gas chamber.

I had never been to a place like Auschwitz before,

and this incredible lady

is one of the few remaining survivors of this barbaric regime.

When we arrived, my mother said,

"I can't believe they're roasting so much meat here."

That's what my mother said, you know,

because she had no idea what was happening here.

That was the smell, burning flesh.

How many souls were lost in here?

Screaming in that shower?

Thinking water was going to come down and just screaming for life.

I can't believe it's taken me so long to come here.

Bielsko-Biala is a city in the south of Poland,

but during the Second World War, it was occupied by Germany.

The synagogue that once stood in this street was burned to the ground

and in fear for their lives,

Jewish families fled their homes.

That's my friend Trauda. She was the Polish champion in 1939.

My club won the Polish championship.

When the war broke out,

the Poles here took away the statue

because she was Jewish and they thought, "They'll destroy it,"

and they hid it and they re-erected it after the war.

'Kitty Hart-Moxon grew up in this city.'

And there are many places that hold happy childhood memories here.

We picnicked here, we played here,

we did some diving, we had training here.

Our mothers used to come in the afternoon and collect us,

you know, and perhaps brought a picnic or something.

But as war loomed, it soon became clear, even to children,

that everything was changing.

We were walking here, and people were clapping all the clubs

and when we walked, we were stoned.

-Stoned?

-Stoned.

Stones came from all over, stones.

And I turned to my friend and said, "Why all these stones?"

She said, "Don't you know? We're the Jewish club and they don't like us."

And then of course, the Jews won the championship, so...

How old were you at that age?

I think we're talking about the year of 1939. I was 12.

-I was going on for 13.

-So what did you say when your friend said...?

I didn't know. I didn't know what it was all about.

It was the first time I was told of anti-Semitism.

The rise of the Nazis was soon overshadowing every aspect of life,

even here at this swimming pool.

That's when the Germans were here,

it's got a picture of a swastika.

-There.

-There.

Yeah, it's got a flag with a swastika,

so that's during the war.

They used it here, the Germans, during the war.

But that swastika, it robs all of those beautiful memories...

-Well, it does.

-..you had of your childhood, doesn't it?

Of course it does. But the good thing is, they were defeated.

But that defeat would be many years after occupation,

years that would have a dreadful impact on many families.

For Kitty, it would mean leaving Bielsko-Biala.

See this big building? We're not far.

Back in the city, she wants to show me all the places she remembers,

including the building

'where her family had lived.'

Changed a lot from now.

Just open the door and walk in.

On the banisters were these wonderful sunflowers.

Very high doors.

Your face has lit up when you came in here.

-Well...

-It has!

-Maybe, yeah!

It's clear that this city does feel like home to Kitty,

and being forced to say goodbye is a moment she's never forgotten.

We had to flee, like two, three days prior to the outbreak of the war

because we were near the frontier and we already knew invasion was...

Obviously, my father knew invasion was going to take place.

My mother and I were on holiday. We weren't here.

We got back and when we got back, there was absolute chaos.

The whole house was in chaos because they were packing everything up

and they were sending us somewhere. And we had to go.

-Was your mum crying?

-No, they were just doughtily getting on with it.

You just knuckle down and do it.

So you don't think of any emotions.

-Kitty, you don't just knuckle down and do it, do you?

-Well, you do.

-It takes a strength. It takes...

-Well, you do,

it's no good you getting emotional and starting crying

because then you're not going to act rationally.

We take for granted now the security we have, don't we?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Because you were just...

-You'd been ripped out of your comfort instantly.

-Yeah,

and worse to come, these people that were fleeing,

they were followed by the planes that were coming over, the invasion,

which were flying very low

and were strafing people that were fleeing.

-Strafing?

-You know, they were shooting.

-Machine-gunning?

Machine-gunning from the planes.

They came very low and people were hiding in ditches and whatever,

and they were hit as they were fleeing.

Kitty and her family were able to get a train out of the city.

Others were not so lucky.

Many Jews were rounded up in Bielsko-Biala

and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The lives they knew were over.

Here, hundreds of thousands would be killed by the Nazis.

Kitty was one child who managed to escape Auschwitz,

if only for a short time.

She travelled with her parents to Lublin in the east of Poland.

It's nothing far. It's very, very close.

'And I'm retracing that journey with her.'

In what was once the Jewish ghetto,

there's a museum that chronicles this city's past.

Kitty's here to retrace her own personal history.

This isn't the actual document

because my documents were taken away by the Gestapo, sent to Auschwitz.

It took me 50 years to find this in the archives in Germany.

'And the staff have agreed

'to help her find the places important to her in Lublin.'

-The church, the forest...

-Yeah.

-The...the manor house?

-Yeah, and the post office.

-And the post office.

Kitty's family travelled to this city to escape the Nazis

but soon after they arrived, German troops invaded

and she remembers them terrorising the Jewish families in these streets.

The round-ups, the police battalions smashing into the homes constantly,

pulling people out, throwing them down,

getting them to assemble at the bottom and deporting them.

-Throwing them where?

-Down the stairs.

Downstairs, from... Sometimes out of the windows.

They just picked people up and threw them. Got it?

Sometimes, when there was such a raid, you hid.

Once, I hid with one of these boys that I knew under the bed.

And I remember I was saying something

and he put his hand in front of my mouth to really keep quiet.

-So they upped the aggression every time?

-All the time, yeah.

All the time there was this terror, you know,

and these incredible massacres that went on.

Increasingly, families in the ghetto

felt cut off from the rest of the world

but some did try to tell relatives what was happening.

My mother would write nearly every day, you know,

and I used to go and post letters,

but that's the only one that came through,

and she wrote it in German so they could read it and censor it.

It was censored. Look.

It's got a "censored" stamp.

She knew not to write anything of any importance, you know,

and my relatives didn't speak Polish anyway, so she wrote in German,

-but it's got all our signatures there.

-Where's yours?

-There.

That's mine, look.

-"Viele grusse" - many kisses?

-Many kisses.

-"Many kisses, Kitty."

-Yeah. Isn't that weird?

'Even getting to the post office

'became difficult for the Jewish population'

as barbed wire and soldiers separated this city.

They never got as far as sealing it

but we always knew they were going to do it.

-41 was closed and surrounded with a fence.

-Yeah.

-And that's the town divided?

-Yeah.

This city was changing, and becoming very dangerous.

They were patrolling almost all the time around the ghetto,

and when you saw a patrol,

you were supposed to get off the pavement into the gutter.

I did know that, and I got off

but my friend didn't get off. He didn't get off.

He said, "Why should I get off?" You know, he didn't get off,

and this patrol, they just pulled this gun

and shot him through the head.

That was the first time I really, really understood danger.

-You saw him...

-I saw him...

-Shot dead?

Shot head, yeah, in front of me.

It must still haunt you.

Yeah, it's been haunting me for a long time because I felt guilty.

Why didn't I pull him, you know, into the gutter, kind of thing.

-How old was he?

-He was 15. He was just a little older than me, yeah.

In fear for his family,

Kitty's family made the difficult decision to leave Lublin.

They travelled to a small village south of the city,

but when troops threatened and killed people there too,

they had no choice but to flee again.

This time, Kitty and her parents hid in woodland.

-70 years...

-70 years.

-..today, I was in this forest.

How can you believe that?

'And this forest had its own dangers.'

In the night-time, we had the wolves.

The wolves came around sniffing, you know.

-The wolves?

-Wolves, pack of wolves, yeah.

There wasn't just one wolf.

They'd go, "Oooh", you know, the wolves' howl?

That's all you heard in the night, with the glowing eyes.

We were not afraid of the wolves.

Kitty, I'm not sure you'd be afraid of anything.

Oh, yeah. Oh, God, no, don't say that.

I was terribly afraid of the patrols

because if they found us, they would have just shot us, you know.

So...oh, yeah, it was pretty scary,

but what do you do?

It's no good screaming because then you give yourself away

so you know, you lie low.

What does it feel like to be back here 70 years later?

It's just incredible, isn't it?

To actually come back to remember the places

-and to tell people what happened.

-You see, if it was me,

I don't think I'd want to go back. I think I'd want to block it out.

-No...

-I wouldn't want to revisit any of that tragedy in there.

It doesn't work. Just believe you me,

if you try to block things out, it does never work

because they haunt you.

No, no, it doesn't work.

That's where a lot of the survivors made a mistake. They just...

They block it out, but it doesn't work like that

because you've got it in your head, and it happened to you,

and you got to actually talk about it.

-I wouldn't last two minutes in there.

-Oh, yes, you would.

-You lasted three weeks.

-You would have lasted a lot longer than me

because you've got all this to get rid of.

You could have lived...

You could have lived on all that for a couple of months!

All these places are important pieces in Kitty's story,

but finding them is anything but easy.

'And it's particularly difficult for me.'

LAUGHTER

I'm all right!

Hold my hand!

One building she's been desperate to find is a church in Lublin.

The priest here gave them false documents

to try to help them evade the Nazis,

and Kitty has fond memories of him.

He looked like a tomato, you know,

a bit like you, kind of red and...

LAUGHTER

So I look like a tomato!

It's a heavy door. Thank you.

This is the church.

It's very much to what it was.

But once given the false papers inside this church,

it was decided the family should be split up for their own safety.

The priest had a plan and the plan was, we had to part,

because we couldn't survive, all of us together, so...

-Which is a pity.

-Well, it just couldn't be done.

We would have all got killed, that's the point,

and we all had different names and things,

and it would have been too difficult.

For men, it was very difficult.

Sometime after they separated, Kitty's father was killed,

but she wasn't to know that until well after the war was over.

Kitty and her mother went to this railway siding

and blended in with a group of Poles being taken to work in Germany,

but when they arrived,

it was discovered by the SS that they were Jews

and they were sentenced to death.

They came for us the next morning and took us into this courtyard,

and we had to stand facing the wall, with the arms up,

and at the back of us,

there were all the machine guns with the men in helmets waiting to shoot,

and then we were just standing there, nothing was happening,

and all of a sudden, there was this great explosion.

It was just, "Pssh!" And some of these people fell to the ground,

you know, and I sort of touched myself, I remember,

and I thought, "Well, I haven't been hit." One of the SS came

and he said, "No, we're not going to shoot you just like that.

"No, no, no. We have to know where these documents came from."

I don't know whether they found out from other people

but certainly from us, they didn't know our documents,

and so what they did eventually,

they commuted our death sentence to life imprisonment in Auschwitz.

Well over a million men, women and children died

in the Auschwitz concentration camps,

and I'm travelling back there with Kitty.

She was just 15 when she was held in Birkenau,

the second of the camps at Auschwitz.

It was known as the death camp.

When people were taken off the trains here,

they were forced into a building known as the sauna.

Here, they were stripped of all their possessions.

Both the prisoners and their clothes were disinfected.

They saw all these constructions, which they didn't know what it was,

and they thought they were factories.

They thought people were working. They saw us working,

wandering around, working,

so it gave people a sense of security, if you like,

because it was all a deception.

Kitty witnessed what the soldiers called the sorting of people.

Well, sorting out meant people who were allowed into the camp,

and people who went straight into the gas chambers.

They were still being sorted out here,

so people were stripped, completely stripped naked.

Children, adults together?

Sometimes children with mothers, sometimes the children on their own.

They'd take the children away from their mothers.

The children weren't allowed to live

so they didn't even come into the sauna.

They were taken straight to the gas chamber.

Do you know what those photographs do for me?

There's all machinery around this place

and the machinery to dehumanise people and to kill people,

and that personalises it.

Well, it does, that is why they have done it.

It shows you the people,

most of whom actually perished here, you know, were killed here.

In Birkenau, the gas chambers and crematoria now lie in ruins,

but Kitty has vivid memories of the crimes committed here.

There was a time when they were burning them alive.

They weren't just burning the bodies that were here, yeah?

There were occasions when they were burning them alive,

so you heard all the screams.

The end of my hut is almost a few yards to the gas chamber.

So what was it like, being so close? What was the smell like?

Well, the smell was horrendous.

When we arrived, my mother said,

"I can't believe they're roasting so much meat here."

That's what my mother said, you know,

because she had no idea what was happening here.

That was the smell, burning flesh, you know,

and you had big chimneys and actually had fire, fire and smoke coming out.

Sometimes the smoke was so dense, the whole place was kind of blacked out.

There was a never-ending stream of people,

so a group of people would be sat in these woods,

just sit there, picnicking.

Children would pick some flowers, there was a flowerbed here,

and a bit of a lawn, you know, just a pretence.

Kitty, the picture you've just painted there in my mind

-is of children here picking flowers...

-Yeah. Yes.

-..and the gas chambers there.

-Yeah.

Life, death.

Yeah, yeah, exactly that. But these people didn't connect that.

They thought they were some factories.

They didn't know those were gas chambers.

Why were the people waiting up there on the hill?

Because there wasn't any room in the gas chamber! They were full.

What's it like, Kitty, watching people walk to their death?

Well, you saw it day in, day out,

and there was absolutely nothing you could do.

You were just helpless, weren't you? You were simply helpless.

There was absolutely nothing you could do.

Well, you had the choice - you could go in with them.

The gas chambers may be gone from Birkenau

but they can't be forgotten,

and a short distance away in the main Auschwitz camp,

there are still some standing.

So this is where they stood.

Yeah, and that's where they threw in the gas.

And these people thought water was going to come down.

Exactly that, that's what they said, "To the showers."

-And they were packed in here?

-Yeah, and then they were burnt in there.

Burnt in the ovens.

All this is presented as a warning from history.

And the possessions of the dead are all around this museum.

It was Kitty's job in the camp to sort through the men's jackets,

looking for valuables.

If you look, those are genuine suitcases.

People had to actually put their names on - why, I don't know,

because they were all going to die, because they didn't know.

All these people are dead,

but that was a deception. People thought, "Oh, well,

"we've got to take a suitcase, we've got to go somewhere."

That looks like a child's case with a little tag on it.

Yeah, there'd be loads of suitcases from all over Europe.

'Kitty has much more to show me, from the crutches taken from prisoners

'not valued by the Nazi regime...'

Aw...

'..to the hair taken from people about to die

'in order to make cloth.'

It fades and deteriorates.

This is the very worst I've seen.

And that's a fraction of what there was, of course, like I said to you.

Most of the stuff's been burnt down.

That's what they salvaged after the war

because they came and burnt it all down.

-So they've just shaved this off people.

-Well, yeah. Some...

Hair was shaved as people came in, into the camp,

but then hair was shaved off also after they were gassed.

I actually wonder, when I ask Kitty if she has been damaged by this,

I wonder, how could she not be?

And she's telling the story and she's asking the questions,

she's pointing out that this is hair from a human being,

but I do think that she has maybe told the story so many times,

because she wants so many people to know,

that she underestimates the impact.

Do you know what? I thought I'd cry when I came here.

I don't want to cry. I'm just so, so angry.

I'm furious.

The possessions on show here are deeply personal.

It's only when I stood beside them that that it really hit me.

-I noticed you crying coming down the stairs.

-Yeah.

It was just the shoes of the children...

I don't know if I can actually... I'm sorry.

Just, when I saw the children's shoes, it was too much.

There were just so many.

But the hair too, we saw the hair...

It's very difficult for me to speak when I cry. Sorry.

But when we saw all that hair...

and the shoes, it was just...

I just realised how many people it was, and...

I just, I don't even know if I can be in this building any more.

I think I might have to go outside.

Fear was a very common emotion in Auschwitz,

nowhere more so than in Block 25,

known as the death block.

When selections were carried out for the gas chamber,

which was nearly every day, somewhere else,

they were put in there naked,

naked, in there, waiting to die,

sometimes three days, four days, a week, without water.

It was in here that female prisoners were held

before being taken to the gas chambers.

The bars on the windows were there so the people couldn't get out

and if you passed it, which you didn't really...weren't to do,

because it was really out of bounds,

hands of people just sticking out, just begging for a drink

because they were here three days, four days,

naked on bare boards, waiting their turn into the gas chamber

and the stench when they opened the doors here was unbelievable.

You could smell it all over the camp,

so you kept away because you knew you were going to be next here.

-There wouldn't have been one person per...

-Eight.

Eight to one of these.

Eight people to one of these,

in all these stone huts.

Kitty, rats live better.

Rats would eat the people alive, you know.

Rats were running around and just biting people.

Kitty and her mother were moved out of Auschwitz

shortly before it was liberated.

They were taken on a so-called death march, used as slave labour

and held in other camps.

Somehow, they survived,

but so many they knew didn't.

When you talk about lots of these people,

these beautiful, lovely human beings, reduced to ash,

does that give you nightmares?

-Does that traumatise you?

-It did, but not any more.

It did, yeah, sure it did.

When you were here or afterwards?

When I was here, I tried to shut it out completely,

you know, like I said to you, you had to hypnotise yourself

so you simply didn't see it, because you couldn't live,

and I saw people that took it in and committed suicide.

So it was either, you took it in, committed suicide,

or you sort of... You don't want to know.

So at what point did you start having the nightmares?

Well, I probably had nightmares immediately after,

and then I began to analyse, "What's the good of me having nightmares,

"what's the good of me hating?"

You're entitled to hate.

You're entitled to hate the people who did this.

Yeah, but it destroys you if you do that.

If you start hating, it destroys you.

-I don't understand that. I just don't.

-Well...

What do you mean, it destroys you? It's natural emotion.

Yeah, but whom do you hate first?

Like we were saying, all these people all around Europe were, um...

responsible, because there were a lot of collaborators.

Are you going to hate everybody? Because you don't know who was who.

Where do you stop the hate?

All around the camps at Auschwitz,

there are reminders of the atrocities committed here.

'For me, I feel privileged to have been on this journey

'with a lady who has survived so much.'

How can you take a body and throw it in there as if it's nothing?

'Her life story is amazing

'and her knowledge of a human being's capacity for evil

'is invaluable.'

This is where they were gassed?

If I was to ask you, of all the thoughts you have,

all the stories you've told,

what is the prevailing lesson about all of this?

Well, the prevailing lesson is, you never know when it can happen again.

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