For those of you who were interested when I mentioned it yesterday:
This is Kitty Hart-Moxon, born a Jew in Poland in 1926. Despite their best efforts to escape the war, she was 16 when she and her mother were captured and taken to Auschwitz. On her first night there, with her number newly tattoed on her arm, she shared a bed with a gypsy woman, who read her palm and told her she would survive. She woke the next day to find the gypsy had died in her sleep, but Kitty and her mother kept going together against the odds, overcoming the horrors which claimed millions. They were deported 2 years later as Auschwitz was being emptied but this wasn't the end of her troubles. She walked with 10,000 others on a death march in which only 200 survived. They were liberated by the Americans from Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war. After a while regaining their strength they were taken to England where they found her Uncle. He told them that he didn't want his family upset, so they were not to talk about what had happened. She found incredulity and even disbelief when folk heard what had happened to them during the war - as if it was too awful to be true and they must have made it up.
Last night she came to our village hall to continue telling people about the horrors they had lived through for the sake of those who hadn't - so that people would know what really happened.
She spoke clearly and spiritedly, but without any great drama, perfect English with a german accent, to the packed hall of villagers, all of whom seemed subdued and awed by her accounts, and possibly as choked up as I was at times by the inhumanity of man.
At the end she sat down to take questions, and it was then, through the rows in front, that I managed to get this poor photo, not wanting to disturb the atmosphere. It was a privilege to be there, to see this tiny elderly lady who had worked close to the gas chambers, witnessed the unthinkable and testified in war-crime tribunals. I was humbled by the thought of how she survived with so little for so long and wondered at the determination that had kept her going despite encounters with Mengele, a fake execution and losing her father, brother and countless friends that banded together to try to survive.
Tiny details will stay with me, odd things like she kept her soup bowl strapped to her, knowing she would not eat if she didn't. She also used it as a toilet despite not having the chance to clean it before eating again -it was the smallest of her worries. She caught typhus and was put into the hospital (more of a quarantine zone) where her mother hid her under a straw pallet and a body when the soldiers came in to remove the dead and march the weakened survivors to the gas chambers.
If you'd like to know more, google her, or check out
http://www.het.org.uk/index.php/survivors-khm.
But don't worry about leaving comments, it's hard to say anything x
