Kitty Hart-Moxon

Kitty Hart-Moxon was sixteen when she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1943 with her mother, having been arrested by the Gestapo at the railway station in Lublin while trying to pass as Polish on forged Aryan papers. She survived the camp for almost two years and a death march and another two camps after that. She was eighteen at liberation. She has lived in England since 1946 and has spent more than fifty years giving testimony to British schools.

The Felix family was from Bielsko-Biała in southern Poland, a comfortable, German-speaking household. Her father was a manager in a textile firm. The family went into hiding in Lublin in late 1939 and lived there on forged papers, working in factories, until the arrest at the station. Kitty and her mother Rosa were sent to Birkenau on the same transport. Her father and brother went on a separate train and were murdered.

At Birkenau, Kitty was assigned to the Aufräumungskommando, the Clearing Detail, also known as Kanada because of the country it evoked in the prisoners’ minds. The detail sorted the property of the murdered, suitcases of clothing, food, jewellery, books, photographs, family papers, taken from people who had been on the trains a few hours earlier and were now ash. The work was, in camp terms, privileged. The women on it had access to the food in the suitcases and to the clothes. Many of them survived because of the access. Many of them, including Hart-Moxon’s later writing, also testified at length to what the work showed them about the scale of the killing. Every train added more piles. The piles never stopped.

Rosa Felix worked in the camp infirmary as a translator. The two women managed to stay in contact for most of the camp period, in defiance of the system that separated families on arrival. Kitty was tattooed 39934. The death march out of Birkenau in January 1945 took her to Gross-Rosen, then to Reichenbach, then to Salzwedel in Lower Saxony, where she was liberated by American forces on 14 April 1945. She and her mother had survived together. They reached England in 1946 and were taken in by an uncle in Birmingham.

Her first memoir, I Am Alive, came out in 1962. She wrote a more sustained second account, Return to Auschwitz, in 1981, after presenting the BBC documentary Kitty: Return to Auschwitz, which followed her on a return visit to the camp with her son David and was widely watched and is still used in schools. The documentary contains some of the most direct on-camera testimony in the British television archive on what the camp was like for an inmate.

Hart-Moxon trained as a radiographer in England, married Ralph Hart, raised two sons, and from the late 1970s onwards spoke regularly to school groups. She has visited Auschwitz with British school groups more than two hundred times, accompanying the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz programme. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. She published a final memoir, Hart-Moxon: A Life of Action, in 2024. She lives in Hertfordshire and continues, as of this writing, to speak in schools.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards