Kitty Hart
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from
"Return to
Auschwitz"
| "I
still see the features and routines of Auschwitz everywhere.
Everyone I have met since the war slots in my mind into an Auschwitz
setting. I know within a few minutes who they would have been and
how they would have behaved, especially when the chips were down.
There may not be the same undisguised physical brutality in our
contemporary surroundings, but the pattern is the same: personal
viciousness, greed for power, love of manipulation and humiliation.
...Nobody gets physically beaten up, tortured, or murdered, but often there is what you might call a slow campaign against life. This breed of killers prefers scheming in an atmosphere of polite treachery rather than speaking malice out loud. But the greed, malice, and power lust are at the heart of it just the same. In April, 1944 two Slovaks managed to escape and sent a full account of life in Birkenau to the Allies, including a copy to the President of the United States. No attention was paid. It was easier to tell oneself that it couldn't be true than to cope with the full implications of the truth. The democratic countries didn't want to listen. They must listen now. Those of us who survived have a duty to those who died. They are not here to speak: we must speak for them... It is important to combat the monthly propaganda of lies which could lead to another war of Nazism in Europe and even in America. Another Holocaust. And just as doubters sneer in indifference, the indifference of civilized countries before the war, during the war, and now. ....It could have happened anywhere. It still can happen anywhere if the conditions are right. ...And, just as guilty as their predecessors in Hitler's army, there will be those who take no active part, yet allow it to happen through selfish indifference. ..." by Kitty Hart.... "She bears witness eloquently." The winter of 1944-45 was so cold that rivers froze. Yet in these last six months of World War II, orders came to evacuate concentration camps, slave labour camps and POW camps in the path of the allied advance. Thousands of starving and ill-clad men and women, most of them Jews, were force-marched over the roads and countryside of the collapsing Third Reich, most without any real destination. Only the strongest survived. Stragglers were shot, those that fell down exhausted were clubbed to death or left to die. Among them was Kitty Felix, barely 17, but already a veteran of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where she had been for nearly two years. In 1945 she began a "death march" with hundreds of other women, including her 55-year-old mother. Now married and living in Birmingham as Kitty Hart-Moxon, aged 75, 57 years on, she's gone back to the scene of this horror. Read her recollections.
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