Kitty Hart-Moxon

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kitty Hart-Moxon , née Felix (* 1926 in Bielsko ) is a Polish Holocaust survivor who was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp at the age of 16 . Shortly after her liberation by American soldiers in April 1945, she and her mother moved to England . There she married and devoted her life to educating people about the extermination of the Jews in the Third Reich .

youth

Leokadia Dobrzynska, the daughter of a lawyer and a teacher, grew up with her brother five years older in Bielsko. She was temporarily looked after by a nanny . She spent her school days at a Catholic school run by nuns. Kitty learned rudimentary English from her mother in her early school days. As a good swimmer , Kitty represented Poland in the youth swimming championship in 1939 and won the bronze medal. When she was twelve years old, her father decided to leave Bielsko because of its proximity to the German and Czech borders. Kitty's family moved to Lublin on August 24, 1939, eight days before the start of World War II . Her house in Bielsko was then looted after the German invasion of Poland .

Ghetto and escape

After the German occupation of Poland, Lublin changed for the family from the supposedly safe place of refuge at first to a place where it was dangerous for Jews to stay. They constantly had to fear that they would be handed over to German soldiers or even shot. There were raids in residential buildings at regular intervals , some of which were confiscated by the task forces. Finally, like all Jews, the family had to move to the Lublin ghetto and live there in cramped conditions under catastrophic hygienic conditions. To make up for the inadequate supply of food, Kitty, at risk of death, organized food for her family in Lublin through a sewer shaft in exchange for valuables that had remained with the family.

In order to escape the ghetto, Kitty's father decided to flee to the Soviet Union with the family . In the winter of 1940/41 the family, disguised as farmers, fled eastwards with horse and cart. They finally reached the border on the Bug River , but found that it had been closed almost 24 hours earlier. The family attempted to cross the frozen river but were sighted and shot at.

Then the family turned back and reached the village of Żabia Wola , about twenty kilometers from Lublin. There Kitty's mother was lucky enough to be offered to teach English to noble Poles. Life in this small Jewish community was almost normal until the family was betrayed to the National Socialists . After a year-long stay, the family finally returned to Lublin. There they went to see a priest who hid them for a while and got them forged identity documents. The family now had passports , birth certificates, and ID cards . The parsonage was directly opposite the Gestapo headquarters . When another raid threatened, the family decided to move to Germany for strategic reasons. At this point in time, the majority of Jews had already been deported from the German Reich , so the family followed the idea of ​​volunteering for forced labor as Poles . Kitty took the name Leokadia Dobrzynska and her mother posed as her aunt. It seemed safer to the father if the family split up and from then on Kitty and her mother were on their own. The grandmother stayed behind in Zabia Wola.

Mother and daughter traveled to Bitterfeld in March 1943 . There they worked under Poles in a factory until they were noticed because of their local dialect and were interrogated. At the headquarters of the Secret State Police in Bitterfeld, the Gestapo officers finally found out after three days that Kitty and her mother were carrying forged papers. You should be executed because of the illegal entry into the German Reich and because of the possession of forged identity documents. A mock shooting took place the following day. They were taken into a courtyard with eleven other inmates and instructed to stand facing the wall. Shots were fired, but not a single bullet hit. The National Socialists only staged this situation to intimidate the other factory employees. Someone from the firing squad said: “You wanted to deceive the German Reich and think you can get away so easily? Oh no. Shoot them would be too good for those like you. Slowly you will perish, each of you! "

Auschwitz concentration camp

Back in the cell, they noticed inscriptions on the cell wall. Messages like “Goodbye in Auschwitz” or “We are on the way to hell” pointed to the horror ahead. It gradually dawned on Kitty and her mother that they had a chance of survival if they continued to hide their Jewish origins and the origin of the documents. They were deported as political prisoners to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and arrived there on April 12, 1943. Auschwitz was barely 50 kilometers from her hometown Bielsko.

Kitty's mother was one of the few elders to survive the first selection . Kitty and her mother did a lot of work in Auschwitz. They tried to stay together and get the best jobs. Kitty became a master at "organizing", trading with or taking from the little she had. Due to the poor conditions in the concentration camp, Kitty fell ill with typhus . She escaped a selection by the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele in the hospital block because her mother hid her unconscious daughter in a sack of straw.

"Canada Command"

From April 1944 Kitty was able to work in the Effects Command, the so-called Canada Command . Her task there was to sort the clothes and belongings of those people who were gassed as part of the so-called final solution immediately after their arrival at the camp . The Canada command was a little outside the camp, as the mass killings of the arriving people had to be kept officially secret. During this phase she was physically separated from her mother, who worked in the hospital block within the camp. Conversations about the gas chambers or crematoria were punished with death. During this work Kitty was able to get new clothes and smuggle out some luxury goods that were sewn into the laundry, for example. Kitty was constantly surrounded by the smell of burnt flesh, hair and bones while she heard the desperate screams of the selected women and children in the gas. Kitty and her mother were already among those prisoners in the camp hierarchy who could not be arbitrarily pulled out for selections. This status brought with it privileges such as being allowed to shower or having hair regrowth.

From September 1944, no more transports arrived in Auschwitz. Kitty and her fellow inmates were still far behind in sorting the luggage in the Canada Command. Kitty heard the explosions and exchanges of fire that occurred in the wake of the Sonderkommando uprising on October 7, 1944. After the failed uprising, everything was prepared for the evacuation of the camp. Kitty was worried: they were the only remaining witnesses and had to be killed after all traces had been removed in order not to be able to tell posterity about the cruelty of the camp.

Groß-Rosen concentration camp

Kitty's mother was selected as one of a hundred inmates allowed to leave the camp. One day, during the usual roll call, her daughter was called out: “Inmate 39934 go to the Kapo !” Kitty expected a severe sentence for smuggling. However, the camp leader had ordered that Kitty go with them on the transport. She could hardly believe the reason for this measure: her mother had bravely addressed the commandant directly and asked that her daughter, who had worked in the Canada command for eight months, could go with her. After more than a year and a half, Kitty's mother had become something of a respected, elderly local. Her courage and her good German must have impressed him, as well as the low prisoner numbers of the two women.

On November 11, 1944, mother and daughter were transferred to a group of a few privileged prisoners in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp , which was used for armament purposes. The work in the factory turned out to be better compared to the work in Auschwitz, and the hygienic conditions and sleeping arrangements were less catastrophic. Groß Rosen had been evacuated and was to be used to relocate Auschwitz prisoners because of the front shifts in the east. Kitty and the others of the hundred Auschwitz inmates had to walk a two-hour walk to the Telefunken factory in Reichenbach every morning and evening . There they were given some food from the German workers every now and then.

Death march

The stay in the Groß Rosen concentration camp lasted almost four months when the Red Army approached at the beginning of 1945 and the Groß Rosen concentration camp also had to be "evacuated". On February 18, 1945, the death march of a column of 10,000 prisoners across the Owl Mountains began ; Kitty and her mother were also in the column . The inmates were forced to drag their guards' luggage and belongings through the cold. Some of the exhausted girls were slain by SS men and many froze to death under the summit of the Great Owl . When they reached the top, they met a group of farmers with cattle and wagons. Because of their shabby appearance, they were stared at in horror, and the inmates seized the moment to milk a cow and steal lard and sausages. The peasants fled as fast as they could.

Finally the prisoners arrived at the Trautenau camp . The column, which originally consisted of 10,000 people, had shrunk to just under a quarter. The half-starved kitty exchanged the teeth she had extracted in Auschwitz, which her father had had foresightedly filled with diamonds, for two loaves of bread. She and her mother ate from this as the train continued near the Dutch border, because Trautenau was also evacuated. The train journey lasted six days; Many of the female prisoners died due to the inadequate supply of food, the unsanitary conditions and the cold.

When they reached the Porta Westfalica station , the prisoners came to the Porta Westfalica subcamp - local mountains of the Neuengamme concentration camp , which was run by Dutch female inmates. When Kitty cautiously asked about the significance of the chimneys, which she had seen from a distance, she expressed concern that they might be gas chambers. The camp managers were outraged. They had never heard of anything like this (see Hart-Moxon, 2001, p. 189 ff.). At that time, only two hundred women had survived the death marches, but all of them were Auschwitz prisoners.

Kitty was assigned to forced labor in a Philips underground munitions factory . The Germans each worked six hours, whereas the concentration camp inmates worked in fourteen-hour shifts. When this camp also had to be evacuated, not all prisoners could be accommodated on the train. Thousands of prisoners were shot down by machine guns in a neighboring forest.

Kitty was transferred to the Fallersleben subcamp and had to find out that only fourteen of the hundred female Auschwitz prisoners were still alive. The Volkswagen factories destroyed by bombing were located in Fallersleben . In contrast to the SS personnel, the female prisoners did not seek refuge in the air raid shelter . The Auschwitz group feared that it would be one of the deceptions with which the SS had often led Jews into the gas chambers. So it happened that the Auschwitz girls were freed from the bunker during air raids and were able to secretly shower hot and get food during this time. Although there was an opportunity to escape, they decided to stay together for security reasons.

One day the group of inmates was evacuated without warning as the Allies were getting closer. They were penned in cattle wagons and transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . At this point, however, this camp was already overcrowded and Kitty and her fellow inmates were herded into additional wagons by the service dogs . The armed guards slammed the doors and boarded them up. The guards retreated. The prisoners stayed in the car all night and many suffocated. Like many others, Kitty scratched tiny holes in the wooden floor so she could breathe some air. She and her mother took turns pressing their noses to the holes. It was only by chance that three guards discovered and freed them (cf. Hart-Moxon, p. 202 ff). There was no sound to be heard from the other wagons and the guards no longer dared to look. Since the inmates outnumbered the guards, they refused to get back on the train. Absurdly, they begged to be transferred to another camp.

They received the news that a small camp outside of Salzwedel was prepared to take them in and had to march there on a death march. At that time there were several camps in Salzwedel. Two were French prison camps and the Salzwedel satellite camp . At the time, the entire area was now surrounded by Allied armies: the end of the death marches was in sight. Now there was no longer any place to move the inmates to. At some point the soup was stopped and they only ate a few raw beets.

“The SS food camps were on the other side of the electric fence. Through the windows we could see rows of golden brown loaves of bread stacked on top of each other. And from the SS kitchen there was a haunting smell of food. Our own food would not keep us alive much longer. It was unthinkable to have to die while redemption was so close. "

- Hart-Moxon, Where Hope Freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 205

liberation

In the second week of April, no more work details were sent to the nearby sugar factory . The SS guards poured a last portion of rotten sugar and fodder beets into the center of the camp and disappeared.

From Friday, April 13, 1945, the bombing of the concentration camps began. Some girls were badly injured in the detonations. French prisoners who had already been freed from the neighboring camps warned Kitty and her friends by means of scraps of paper that they threw over the fences. They believed that cables had been laid around the camp and that the entire area was mined. It seemed that the National Socialists wanted to blow up the remaining Jews. The French promised to do their best to cut the cables and the electric fence during the night. That night everyone lay awake, but nobody dared to check whether the fence was still under tension.

The next day, American tanks rolled into the camp where Kitty and her little "family" were to be liberated. Kitty took advantage of the commotion and got large rations of food from the SS barracks.

In the days that followed, the ex-prisoners looted everything they could get in the city. Kitty and her friends ravaged German houses, set fire to their carpets and clothes, or spilled gallons of precious milk on the floor.

“Today I took the time to look around and really look at German apartments. I tried what it was like to lie in a real bed with sheets and pillows. I ran over carpets. In one house, I stretched out on the bed. Then I felt something hard under the mattress. When I pulled it out, I was holding a large, framed picture of Hitler in my hands. The elderly housewife had followed my movements. She trembled and let out a scream: “Take everything, but please don't take the picture of my beloved guide! Please! ”I was angry. "Do you dare tell me?" Two of my friends came into the room and held her while I broke the gilded frame, tore out the picture and lit it. We smashed everything that fell into our hands and moved on through the city. "

- Hart-Moxon, Where Hope Freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 210

The Americans invited the ex-prisoners to a ceremonial burning down of the camps. The Americans attacked many SS men in plain clothes. After three days of foraging, laws were introduced and Kitty and her mother found work as interpreters for their liberators.

They then moved on to help reunite families. Kitty and her mother tried to track down their own family members. It turned out that they were both the only survivors of the former extended family. Kitty's father was discovered by the Gestapo while on the run and was shot in the head. Her brother Robert had been killed by a sniper's bullet in combat. Her grandmother was murdered in the Belzec extermination camp .

After the war ended, Kitty and her mother emigrated to Great Britain in 1946 . Kitty received no support from the local Jewish community. On the contrary, talking about the Holocaust was felt to be shameful and when someone asked Kitty about her tattooed prisoner number, she was stunned that no one knew about the concentration camp atrocities. At times she got really angry and wore this number openly to provoke and to confront other people with the truth. She did not understand why other concentration camp survivors tried to cover up the tattoo with a cloth or piece of jewelry.

When Kitty was training to be a nurse in England, she made a decision:

“When I was working in the children's hospital, I decided to have my Auschwitz number cut out on my arm. In the end, I felt compelled to do so as a result of the many unfriendly comments from people who obviously had no idea what this number meant. My mother never considered anything like that. Only after her death in 1974 was I allowed to have her number cut out as well. (...) A gruesome relic, but such memorabilia must be preserved for the future. "

- Hart-Moxon, Where Hope Freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 27

The silence of the society inspired them to take up the education about the Holocaust . Primarily, she did this by making her life story available to the public. She wrote a report about her time in Auschwitz ("I am Alive", 1961) and, in 1978, shot the television documentary Kitty: Return to Auschwitz together with the documentary filmmaker Peter Morley .

After the war

After the liberation, Kitty found it difficult to integrate herself into social life, as she had never got to know social rules and manners. There were worlds between her and her colleagues in the hospital, the well-protected nurses and Kitty found no common ground on which to develop a friendship. Kitty didn't obey any rules in the nurses' home either. Since childhood, she still followed her motto “Never obey!”. She stayed outside until after the curfew , where she met her future husband, Ralph Hart. He himself was not a concentration camp prisoner, but his family perished in it. Despite the ban, she married during her apprenticeship and became increasingly unpopular with her superiors, with the exception of Dr. Brailsford. In 1949, Kitty and her husband were able to afford a three-day, Spartan honeymoon.

“Since the exams were imminent, we spent most of the time with Ralph asking me questions before the gate closed, so to speak, and giving me support. Everyone in the hospital knew by now that I was too unreliable to ever do anything. In April I was the only one from my academic year who was able to gain further qualifications. "

- Hart-Moxon, Where Hope Freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 25

With the help of the radiologist Dr. Brailsford managed to get Kitty to the Birmingham Royal Orthopedic Hospital . He was one of the few people who cared about Kitty's story and shared her fate. He gave her money now and then and paved the way for her to study. Kitty had not graduated from school, but she was admitted due to an exemption from having previously completed nursing training. She had made this decision because she did not feel suitable for the profession of nurse. She couldn't really feel sorry for the patients and felt out of place.

After attending college, she found a job in a private radiology company. She had a strong need to start a Jewish family. In 1953 their first son, David, and the following year, their second son, Peter, was born. When her children went to school, Kitty caught up on the knowledge she had missed due to her imprisonment in parallel with class.

Hart-Moxon was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2003 for her educational work about the Holocaust.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 37 ff.
  2. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 48 ff.
  3. ↑ Quoted from: Hart-Moxon: Where Hope Freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 78
  4. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, pp. 80–86
  5. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, pp. 144 ff.
  6. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 152 ff.
  7. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 173 ff.
  8. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 176 ff.
  9. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 180ff.
  10. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 187 ff.
  11. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 196
  12. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 200
  13. ↑ cf. Hart-Moxon: Where hope freezes. Survival in Auschwitz , Leipzig 2001, p. 206 ff.
  14. ^ Stuart Jeffries: Memories of the Holocaust: Kitty Hart-Moxon. "We were prepared to die there but it turned out to be a mock execution - a piece of Nazi cruelty" . In: The Guardian of January 27, 2010
  15. ^ Complete revision of the book from 1961
personal data
SURNAME Hart-Moxon, Kitty
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kitty Felix; Leokadia Dobrzynska
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-British Holocaust survivors
DATE OF BIRTH 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielsko , Poland