RADIO 4 INTERVIEW

Female Auschwitz survivor - Kitty Hart-Moxon

I listened to a radio interview from an Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon. These are the notes that I made from this:
She remembers everything that happened prior to being taken. She and her mother had moved from her home town into another town where they were found out by the female citizens that they worked with. Kitty said that they the reason that they were turned in was because it seemed that the women that worked with them were jealous because she and her mother could both speak perfect German and also had an office job compared to them working in the factory. The women worked out that Kitty and her mother were not from there because they had a slightly different accent.

Only Kitty's mother survived with her. Her father was shot, her brother was called for the army and her grandmother had to be left behind.

Kitty knew nothing about Auschwitz before she got there.

Women were better at looking after each other - they helped each other out even though conditions for women were a lot worse than what they were for men. The women would try and make 'friendship groups' of about 4-5 women that all had different skills and jobs. For example in her 'friendship group' one of the females worked by the lavatories, one with the clothes and one was a nurse.

Nobody was at all confident that they would survive - "the only way out is through the chimney. And we all knew what that meant.", "Each day we stayed alive was a gift."

When she got to England after they were set free, Kitty had a horrendous time. No body wanted to know what had happened to her, people would refuse to talk about it and would whisper behind her back about the tattoo on her arm. It took 10 years for somebody to ask question about what happened. Kitty was angry that no body seemed to care and them refusing to even try and understand.

Kitty now goes around teaching children and young adults in order to help them understand and know about the events to try and prevent it from ever happening again.