Kitty Hart Relives the Nightmare of Auschwitz | Our Life

this film is about living in auschwitz it is about one woman who survived i've got to take some pictures of the upper part of your neck i'm sorry i've got to ask you have you have you need dentures no no no one's knocked them out oh i've knocked your teeth out now do you play dragon ball yes no one's knocked your teeth out kitty heart is a radiographer she lives and works in birmingham for six years as a young girl she fought for her life against the system the nazis had created to destroy her and all those like her for two of these years she was a prisoner in auschwitz now after 34 years kitty hart has decided to go back to auschwitz to try to begin to explain what happened and how it happened and how it was possible to go on living at that's all super kitty was born in 1926 in bielsko a small town in southwest poland her father carl felix was a successful merchant and ran the family business his wife lola was a practical and well-educated woman she had a talent for languages and devoted some of her time to teaching english kitty and her elder brother robert in 1937. by this time kitty had a reputation as a tomboy she was mischievous competitive and always getting into trouble oh i was a terrible child i did the most ghastly things at school and used to be thrown out of the class always uh i should be sent home from holiday homes yeah because i i'd get out in the night and ski at night and everybody was asleep i never really obeyed any rules whatever whether it was at home or at school i was always you know my marks as far as behavior were always it was always a cause for complaint when she was nine kitty was sent to the convent school of notre dame it was an expensive and fashionable school which catered for the daughters of biaosko's more prosperous citizens her school reports continued to show a talent that was athletic rather than academic it was the end of the summer term 1939 this report is the last that kitty would ever receive from the sisters of notre dame it is also the only documentary evidence remaining that the felix family had ever lived in biasco when the germans invaded poland in september 39 bioscope was immediately threatened the felix family fled to lublin a month later the victorious nazi army had caught up with them i've never seen germans before and i thought they looked absolutely splendid they had this fantastic uniforms and black boots and i remember them marching across the city um with a um sergeant major you know waving his baton and conducting a military band and i i was most fascinated and my father used to run after me and pull me home and not allow me out and i couldn't understand why i thought are these marvelous soldiers why am i not allowed to go and see them and so i used to sneak out and just watch the parades the fact that the germans were out to kill people like me came to me very suddenly there was one very important rule and this was that when soldiers walked along the town the city the pavements everybody else had to get off the pavement and i walked along the pavement with this boy and i instinctively got off the pavement and he didn't get off the pavement and one of them pulled out his gun and shot him through the head and there was this friend of mine just dropped dead and this was the you know and i ran home and and said this and and this is this was the very first moment that i realized they were out to kill to escape the german terror that had now begun kitty's brother robert fled to russia in an attempt to reach england her grandmother who had been in hiding with the family was seized by a nazi extermination squad now carl felix made his last and most desperate bid to keep his family alive it was to separate him from them forever he arranged new aryan identities for his wife and daughter and then smuggled them onboard a train taking polls to germany for forced labor kitty and her mother were taken to the ige farben works at bitterfelt a year later the gestapo were tipped off that amongst the polish laborers there were some jews the gestapo people came in in civilian clothes they were not in any uniform there was this man in civilian clothes he came in and said tomorrow we're having dancing we're all going to have a dancing lesson and it's just the way he said it we we knew automatically were going to die um there was some something in his in in his barking sort of voice you know that put it across oh he did say he did say you might as well say goodbye to one another because tomorrow we are having a dancing session um and then we were brought we were taking out a dawn um and put up against the brick wall and all the machine guns were lined up um and and those soldiers were there ready to shoot and shots were fired and my very first impression was that i had been missed because i was facing the wall um and there were screams um and then it was very quiet you see and all of a sudden there was this terrible laugh from beyond and would realize that they were not going to shoot us it was just to to frighten us and of course many of us broke down and cried and i don't remember crying i i just felt a tremendous relief that i hadn't actually been struck from bitterfelt kitty and her mother were transferred to another prison in dresden and it was here they got their first idea of what was in store for them there were various rumors about auschwitz that whoever goes there never comes out um there were inscriptions on the walls i'm on my way to hell but i didn't relate this to to any hell to me hell was that having been on the run for three years and i thought well here we come to a place there will be our enemy and we will have something to fight kitty and her mother were transported back to poland they arrived in auschwitz on april the second 1943. kitty was now 16. she had been on the run since she was 12. although i was psychologically ready for auschwitz when i got there the very first time i'm not quite sure whether i'm psychologically ready to go and face it this time i don't know what it will do to me to see it i don't know if i'll be as detached as i was when i got there in the first place when i knew i had to face death or life or death to see it now may make a very much bigger impression on me than what i expect i would like my son david who is a doctor working in canada to come over and see it for himself because he so much wanted to see it and so much wanted to understand how people could live there maybe i should go back because very soon there will no longer be people like me alive in another 30 or 40 years that there will be no one who can actually say well i have seen one two three million people die and i would like my son to to to be able to say my mother was there and i am telling my children um what my mother saw and i feel it is my duty to go back even though i'm psychologically not ready for it feeling slightly thick inside that's all right i'll just wait and see just wait and see here i am now wait a minute wait a minute i'll come find my bearings here you know one of the reasons you're here don't you well just look at this terrible emptiness just can you imagine this place full of people imagine i can imagine this in the winter or the snow as well are those that's where the fence used to be okay just let me come across myself perhaps i've come to speak for people have died but i've had 30 good years i've not i'll tell you why i'm here it's most important now do you know why because they're people in this world they said this has never happened they're writing about it they're saying oh this has all been you know it's not true you are here just to see that it is true it was true and so that when you have children you can bring them here and tell them about this and i owe this to all the people that have died i'm sure i do 30 members of your family have died here your grandfather your grandmother my family all my school friends everybody out of our hometown all your father's family everybody's ashes are here so let's just go and see if we can find something now i think this is b1 i think i don't remember coming in through this no these rail lines weren't here you see in 1943. do you think they've been put here since oh yes i came i came in the middle of the night and i didn't come through this gate i think i came through some side gate and and and these are the rails that i helped to build was is this where this where the fences were was it oh the fences well the whole place was lit up when i came here and then it was a kind of smell of roasting meat and you thought god surely that can't be roasting a lot of meat here and there was a peculiar glow in the distance and you thought well what the bloody hell is this glow still we went on and as i said was the middle of the night you didn't really know where you were except for the whole whole sort of thing what was over there i'm trying to find camp b1 and i think you've got through that now these railway lines were built and they go all the way to the end and the people came in here in the trains were brought in there you see but before that happened before people came along here they just walked along like where you're walking along here just imagine hundreds and thousands and millions of people walked along this road here with our bundles tiny children old people someone had to be carried and i just walked all the way to the end i haven't got my bearings but i think this is b1 i think there's got to be a way in here just just look at it as far as you can see you'll see camps 22 camps not just one camp we're talking about the tiniest mini section which is this i worked on this railway now the worst thing you could do was working outside and i i have to build this railway not lay i actually didn't lay the rails i carried the cement that's why my hands are not ladylike because i carried the cement and carried um enormous big stones and that's where the dogs came and were let loose on you and that's where i was bitten i see my scar here don't you yes anyway i'd like to be able to find my way in uh now there's an entrance there's gotta be an entrance and don't take any notice of the grass because there was no grass what was in oh this is mud just a sea of mud damp it was damp in the summer and so what's full of snow in the winter thick was snow in the winter and it was always wet and your feet were always stuck in the mud up to the sometimes as far as the calf this this grass has been laid since and there was just this one road approaching through well this was the main road to bring the people to the gas chambers this very road david this this was the most important place of all see this gate let me tell you about this gate now the commandants stopped here the ss the ss women that's where they stood people came to work external work from there from the camp five o'clock in the morning the groups went out to work outside digging trenches doing what you like right people who went that way never came back right so this was that's what led to the crematorium that's the way to get crematory right so here if you were brought in through this gate you could live for a bit but you if if you went that way you never lived that was the end that was the way to die if you managed to stay in this enclosure you could still live a little longer right here somewhere here was the orchestra a full orchestra right just imagine it prison orchestra alma jose conducting she was a very famous musician she died let's find out bearing here now i came in i came here during the night now i went into a place called the saunas sauna right where everything was taken from you that was your very first thing that happened to you everything was taken off you and you were shaved naked smeared with some kind of green fluid and we were given a prisoner of war uniforms there were 20 000 russian prisoners of war that were shot here just before i arrived and we were given their uniforms by that i mean their trousers and their tops and you only allowed to wear one layer so you had nothing else no underwear remember i would like to find block 25 because block 25 had the most terrible significance the selections of the guest chambers were carried out it's a number weekly oh there's a number on the brick there isn't that is that am i right perhaps something written on there let's just go across 23 isn't it 73 73 it's 25 we're looking for now you picture here bodies just bodies and you can picture people being beaten up here the whole of the time we're walking in an emptiness you must picture here a continuous shifting population because people died and more people were being brought in from all over europe so we're looking this block 27 and this is 20. this is blocked now this was my block i was here for months and months in this block and that's where i hid actually because i i pretended i belonged to a group of workers in siemens and i didn't so i slept there during the day and i slept there during the night i went i walked in through this here through this entrance as you walked in you got your bread ration so i got my br and and here were the roll calls you see everybody was standing here a thousand women standing in front of each block twice a day right here stood the block el tested a woman in charge of the block that's where you're beaten as you got in every time you got in you got beaten and every time you got in you got your bread rushing you went in and let's go inside ah that was my block now then i often bought myself a place to sleep here you see bought myself with my crumb of bread a place to lie on one of these boards because if you didn't you had nowhere to sleep you could you was here look at the mud just look yes that's it barefoot sometimes as dirty as it is oh it was worse because people they couldn't go to the toilet there were no toilet facilities no toilet there was a bucket at one end but you had to fight to get to the bucket or you had to have permission to use the bucket and mostly you couldn't use the bucket so you were lying in your own mess and everybody else's mess right now it was very easy to lose the desire to live let me tell you very easy so don't be surprised when people gave up because you live like this for just a few days without water without food and you're beaten all the time and no change of clothes and how long do you think you want to live there that was oh that was just a little bit of lighting but no light it was pretty dark in here at night yes thousand women in here in the total darkness trying to find somewhere to sleep right every night not just one night let's just go and see here ah now then sometimes uh sometimes there was a bit of water here but a thousand women trying for a drop of water now i don't remember this because i never ever managed to get as far as this i washed in my urine david that's what i that's where i washed you know and what's more you had to keep your body clean because if your if selections were carried out you see the ss came in here everybody had to get down strip and then they looked you over and if you were dirty and you had some sort of i mean if you were too thin your number was taken down and you never heard anymore you know this was the end you thought oh they've just taken your number for some reason perhaps you get a flogging but it wasn't so a few days later all the numbers were called out and you were taken to block 25. anyway that's where i live david for two years uh no not quite i'm exaggerating one and a half years now in the mornings four o'clock in the mornings you were driven out from there and you stood here so in fives here you were counted and you can imagine that people kept on going to different blocks because that you know they got mixed up it's not always that you found your way to your block quickly enough so you stood outside somebody else's block oh boy if things if if numbers didn't match up you stood until the numbers matched up sometimes three hours four hours right through the night in the meantime bodies were lying along here you see because people just collapsed and died this must be block 25 because it's got the burns and i don't need to see a number because i can see the bars now when selections were carried out to the gas chambers people were stripped mostly they were stripped naked put into the block 25 now everybody kept away from here because through the bars you could see hands sticking out hands of people sticking out begging just for a drink because they were naked there sometimes three days four days waiting to die waiting to be taken to the guest chair with people that have perhaps survived the camp for six months eight months ten minutes not just coming from home whoever went through there never never ever came out you just couldn't get anybody out hands were sticking out here day and night begging just for a sip of water so that they could oh they didn't give them anything nothing three days four days sometimes a week and sometimes when they opened up the doors the stench was such that you could smell it right through the camp a lot of my friends when they could no longer live went on the fence and when i say went on the fence the slightest touch of the fence and you committed suicide and if you touched this person you committed suicide too you were allowed to walk as far as the trench you were allowed to walk but if you passed the trench you were shot at because they didn't really want you to commit suicide they wanted to kill you off here now i think what we ought to do i must tell you about the toilets because when i came here there were no toilets and there was no water no water whatever eventually they built they've laid on water you see when i came first there was no water but we built the prisons built everything of course in here so all you had was your tea that you got in the morning and that if you could drink it which i couldn't because every time i drunk it i had a diarrhea so i couldn't drink it i used to wash myself i don't know it was dark blue and it contained bromide or something to poison you so i didn't drink it so there was no water and there was absolutely nothing no soap no water no change of clothes you soon lost your will to live david it was very very easy believe you me you see i had realized one very important thing well one of the best things to do in this camp was to do nothing just just be invisible just you know hide hide i mean there were fifty thousand a hundred thousand people here so you could hide be behind people if you were small insignificant invisible as i try to be but the other thing i found is one of the best things to do was to carry bodies why i mean it was very hard work but hey you worked inside the camp you didn't do external work you see and b the dead body had a russian bread piece of bread the dead body had won a change of clothes and it wasn't any good to this dead body was it i mean i don't have to feel guilty about this do i that's true but this is what i thought well i'm not doing anybody any harm i'm taking this piece of bread from this dead body and i'm taking this one pair of boots and i can sell it and with this i can buy myself a place to live i can buy myself a place to sleep so this they are right there they are watching this this is a wash that's it it's here now the water was here and you couldn't get in because in charge of this was some ruling prisoner with a whip right now how do you get in if you want to be beaten up you could have gotten you say but if you could give her something like your bread ration which i got of my dead body that i load it you see i mean our dead body is 304 so i bought myself a bit of access to go in there and perhaps just i couldn't have a wash i mean can you imagine 2 000 well there were 50 000 in here and just a few blocks of these you see everybody had to pile in there you had to perhaps the half a minute to get in there and get out so how do you wash you couldn't take anything off because if you took it off you didn't see it again so you were left naked and what happened then you were as good as dead because there was no means of getting another pair of anything right so you went in fully cloud you welted fully dressed and you got a bit of water in your bowl your bowl was tied to your body your bowl was your life if you didn't have your bowl if you didn't have your bowl you didn't have your soup if you didn't have your bowl you didn't have your toilet because your bowl was your toilet you understand how did you wash the bowl out you didn't before you ate well you didn't you didn't you didn't wash it out that was that was your life your bowl my bowl it was red now you must you must picture thousands of women trying to get in here thousands i'm not talking about five ten i'm talking about twenty thousand thirty thousand right let's let's go in let's go in fine see you good nice show me oh my god oh god now that that meant life or death for somebody i can tell you because all you had were wooden plugs i had wooden plugs all the time to have a pair of leather shoes would have cost you 15 days bread rations so either you ate or you had your pair of shoes didn't matter if they were like this there were leather shoes god leather shoes absolutely fantastic thing to have in in this place a pair of leather shoes you know if you took them off at night you never had them again in the morning so you slept in your shoes you slept in all your clothes i slept in my clothes about 12 months the very same clothes you know if i if i had managed to get two layers well i slept in two layers mostly i had paper stuffed inside because i worked well no there was no newspaper or newspaper boy where did you find newspapers what sort of paper well i carried cement laying the railway it was the cement and the cement bags paper was very good insulating stuff and i had it inside my uh underneath my my dress let's go right in anyway let's just go in here now sometimes sometimes you got to this precious tap here right where water dribbled out and you had a little bit of water and you took it into your bowl and would in and then you washed or you drank it because there was nothing else to drink so really for drinking if you could get it was it clean water was it oh you didn't worry about clean water it was wet i mean in the winter i didn't worry about water because i at the snow and i washed with the snow but during the summer sometimes it was boiling hot and you need it to drink now i don't know whether this was a toilet block over there it could be i just looks like basins in there like this i'm not sure what do you think no no this is different no i think i think this ah this is your toilet uh before a roll call you were allowed to go in here but you only had a few minutes and you have thousands of women trying to get in there and those were your advice and no paper or anything like that oh paper boy god what sort of but you're in toilet paper yeah you must be joking yeah well like if you could go in there and do something and it didn't go down your legs and you know you sometimes during three half hour roll call you had to do something the only time to go to the toilet was when there was a commotion you know the whistles blew and you had to go and stand in front of your block so you you thought ah now we're going to try and try and get in there so if you could possibly get in there now let's go and see it now one was sitting here or perhaps three were sitting here because you because you couldn't just have one hole to yourself so you hadn't so you were sitting sort of like this and somebody else was sitting there you see and then before you finished somebody pushed you off because the other one wanted to go you see that's right and all this there there you are that's what they had these metal just as you see it was this metal thing here well i couldn't tell you what this is but then somebody had to work in the sheis commando now the shy's come god it's too bloody funny really the scheisse commander is was a work group people who had to dig that stuff out put it in buckets and carry it to the cesspool now i worked on the chaise commander for some time also because i've worked with most work parties here and the chase commander was very good because you had a bar at the back here and two buckets and then you sort of carried the in each bucket you see across the shoulder and you carried it to the cesspool and presented at the back there so you carry the actually you you know you had to empty this into buckets and carried it and that was a very good work party because you see you were actually working inside the enclosure of the camp it was very prestigious to be in a shy's commando somewhere there must be some wooden hut which was the quarantine now that's where you were initiated into the camp now the quarantine block was just just a stable with a thousand women inside imagine each one of these holding at least a thousand people you can't imagine it that's where i spend my first night now my first night was spent here in one one of these somewhere and i don't think it was on the top i think it was somewhere in the center it was best if you could lie on the top because at least you had a bit of air but you see sometimes you couldn't you had to lie down there there were about a thousand people in here thousand women that have already been in here a few days and some were dead some were sitting on here my mother and i we scrambled onto here somewhere and i was lying next to some woman and it turned out she was a gypsy you know and she looked at me and she sort of looked at my hands and she said you're going to come out i don't know you know what i'm actually talking about i'm going to come out she looked at my hands and i think it was a psychological thing it stayed with me really right through i i'm you know i kept on saying this gypsy said to me i'm going to come out i've got to live because she said so anyway i slept i slept right through the night because i was terribly tired and been no food for about 48 hours because we'd come from prison and we would miss the bread ration you see because that was only given out in the evening and wheat came in almost during the morning but this was dark anyway i think the day had to be spent outside but the evening was here and i'm talking about my first night and i slept next to this gypsy and then i was terribly cold at night you see and i because we only had one layer of clothes and those were the russian uniform just a sort of a cocky affair no my head had been shaved and then you know i've never been without hair so i was terribly cold and i didn't know what i was a cold and then a whistle blew and everybody started rushing out this very first moment very first morning and and i shook this woman you see and she was cold you see and she died in the night and she was dead for some hours and this is why i was so cold because she was she was dead and so i said to my mother i said now look she's dead i know what it's got to be done we've got to have her clothes and we've got to have her bride ration if she's got one because it's not good to her and then it came to me that this was the way to live you must have it off the dead and and and and this was the principle that i adhered to all the time that you must take off the dead you must never never take anything of the people that are alive but it's yours if the people are dead you must take advantage of this and so my very first things i stripped this gypsy i stripped off everything she had and so both my mother and i had almost immediately a second layer of clothes and a second bread ration when it was necessary to have now let me tell you the hospital blogs were exactly the same this is this is what made me cry because the hospital blocks were like this and all that remains over there on the hospital compound and other chimneys but my mother was in charge of this gate at some night and the purpose was not to allow anybody out because everybody you know especially the sick try to get out but i've i've got out one night i got out because i was determined to heat this bloody thing up and how did you manage that well i saw a heap of wood and i i curled along and i uh got this piece of wood i got as far as i got in actually but of course i was followed and i think i have told you before i had a public vlogging 25 strokes and the whip wasn't just one whip with one piece of leather there were about 25 pieces of leather so every time you had one stroke you already had 25. so this is why i have got one or two scars where my flesh just opens up but anyway nonetheless many many times we achieved the the thing and heated this thing here i'm not sure whether this is this end or the other end but one end you could actually heat it yeah now when you did heat this this became lukewarm so then people just said then you were sitting on along that and but that didn't last very long so this this was the heating channel but it rather shook me you know because i i've spent many nights sitting on this heating channel actually when i couldn't find anywhere to sleep all this was the hospital section all this vastness you see each one of these was a wooden block do you see your grandmother only survived because she worked on the hospital block now i know you're seeing grass but i don't see grass i see mud just a sea of mud and believe you me if there was one blade of grass you know what would have happened you would have eaten it my mother worked in block 12. that was the infectious block typhus dysentery scarlet fever this area now i i know block 12 was here because you see from block 12 you could actually see people walking along this street to the crematorium it was right up against the fence so this must be block 12. it doesn't say anywhere you know you have got no no indication i don't know that she's all been taken away and burnt but you just look at the size of this from there to there and this house about a thousand women in here and the death toll was oh five six hundred a night so all day long you carried out the bodies of from the night before was it a good job for a prisoner to work in the infection well if my mother hadn't had hadn't worked in here she would not have lived two days now all this was quarantined as you know and on the very last day of the quarantine a girl came over that comes from our hometown and she promised to come at the end of the quarantine period and of course she did come it had to be paid for that she came i had to pay in bread but she came and she took a mother away and she said i've got a job for you in this hospital block on this here 12th block 12 which was the typhus block and she was here right through working as a sort of a nurse but of course she couldn't nurse anything there was no never know um so what would you medicine advantages well can you imagine a tremendous advantage first of all she didn't have to be outside for the roll call so she would spare the roll call twice a day because the stick were not actually taken out to be um counted it was all done inside the block and the same for the staff so this was a very very big advantage not having to stand outside three or four hours twice a day and of course you were sheltered from the elements i mean it's cold here today isn't it very cold what are you wearing five layers of clothes huh quite a few all right well you'd imagine people in this here uh working when it snows when it rains when the sun is hot in the summer and in the winter one layer of clothes the same layer of clothes day and day wet in the wet and you couldn't take your clothes off so it was that in order to live you had to find some way of working indoors inside or even with inside the campus better than external and how long did my grandmother work on this she was here almost throughout she did tremendous work because although she she couldn't uh um save people's lives in the sense that she had no medicines to give them but she was a tremendous woman now you know moral support i know i mean you could keep people alive by just talking to them you see and begging them to live just one more day and this is what she did and she kept me alive by begging me to live another day and i kept her physically alive by bringing stuff to keep her alive physically and she kept me alive mentally so very often when i was in quarantine i got away you see this was a slave labor market sort of when you were in quarantine and so the four women and the ruling party came to fetch you for work now if you could get away during this commotion and after a roll call i used to find my way into here and straight up until my mother's bank hid underneath a sick person and that's where i remain throughout the day so what i don't understand is why did they not shoot the infectious and sick patients why would they hurt them into the one no it wasn't like they didn't shoot them they were selected to die every day sometimes the staff had to carry out the people in front here they were lined up here and selections were carried out now i will i went through a selection mangler wearing white gloves i came out here i was after typhus and i had to strip naked and and run if you hadn't if you couldn't run well you were selected to go to the other side but of course i was after typhus and i couldn't run at that time i was still crawling i was actually on my knees as far as here i was on my knees and and my mother said now you've got to go you've got you've got to stand and you you've got to run you say i did i ran in front of him and then he pointed that way so i lived oh you're a doctor you know what happens during typhus but you are mentally deranged this is part of the symptom of typhus you i was mentally deranged for about three months i think and one of the symptoms was that everybody had hallucinations and imagine that at the bottom of your bed were all these fantastic fruits and and juices and nobody wants to give it to you and i used to scream apparently and my mother had to strap me just to make sure that i stay on this bank and one day there was a selection actually mengele came in and there was a selection within the hut and my mother took me put me underneath that straw mattress and put another body on top of me and i was unconscious at that time so she said she saved my life because everybody that was lying on the bank on another bank was taking to be guest everybody and if i hadn't been underneath well i would not have survived i began to recover from typhus but my my health just didn't pick up and i i i was completely deaf uh and a personal doctor decided that the only way to get over this deafness was to pierce my ears but of course there were no instruments so there were two little needles and they pierced my ears i remember you tell him that's right now then i was ready to be thrown out you say and i would have had to go back onto external work and it was again buying your way into onto some sort of into some sort of position and eventually i managed to buy my way in to stay and work in an infectious disease in the infectious in the dysentery block i think i worked which i think was the next block the dysentery block and after that was the tv block yeah i stayed and worked i worked as a uh putserka which was this sort of an orderly carrying out bodies and that was very very difficult because bodies were on the top bunk threw it down pulled it all along here all along here and then the lorries and then all the bodies were just sort of heaped up you see you got quite accustomed to bodies just lying heaped up and then we had to load the bodies two people loaded the bodies just give me your hands and i assure you you should do like this yes two one and then three three through that's it the bodies were loaded down right now i stayed on like this for some time and lots and lots of my friends came in and i nursed one one of my cousin my on my father's side came in and i missed this cousin and she died yes i remember my son and one or two aunts of mine died here on this block and on that block and then i had two friends that we saved from a selection from prison to two girls two sisters and they they have survived already eight months you see and then one day mengele came in and he said the whole block's going to be emptied everybody out so all the stuff that was i was staffed by then we had to ring this area i think there was this block over there we all stood around here we we were standing around they brought all the people out and we were standing holding hands you say like this so that they couldn't escape and all the sick even the convalescents they were well they were already well why did he want to clear the block he wanted to clear the block because there were lots of new sequence coming in so he cleared the whole block and everybody had to be loaded on and i had to load my friends on and don't finish me that really finished me mentally i think that finished me i'm sure it did but it was my mother that stopped me going on the fence that day everybody went everybody you mean you wanted to commit seriously well i just didn't want to live you see that all my friends were on this block and they were well and i'd been here a year 12 months and then they i had to load them up you see and i wanted to go with them but of course they'd stop me usually my mother came out and she just grabbed me and stopped me it's really yet another occasion when she saved your life oh yes during that period she saved my life yes oh we could not have to survive without each other that there's no doubt about that you couldn't have lived on your own you have to have somebody to help just for you to survive and you had to help somebody else i don't know about the men i couldn't tell you what how the men managed to survive but conditions in the women's camp were a thousand times worse than conditions because of the overcrowding i don't know i think they were afraid to have too many men and they didn't mind about having so many women and and and then then there was we were all told now you have to go and work externally again you see and all of a sudden they came in and said they were going to form a new commander and if we like we can join it and it was the canada commander it represented food drink everything that you needed because all the possessions that people have brought in that came along here were down there and my mother said well you must she thought if i could just live one day and taste some food just once while i live then it was worthwhile early in 1944 adolf eichmann visited auschwitz and ordered the camp commandant to prepare for the arrival of even greater numbers of people for extermination as a direct result of this order kitty hart by this time just 17 years old was taken from the women's camp to work in the canada commando canada was auschwitz slang for an isolated section of the camp near the gas chambers where it was said there was an abundance of everything in reality it was where the clothes and belongings of nazi victims from all over europe were sorted and packed for shipment to germany now this is a canada commando enclosure here this was all pretending to be a garden pretending to be a factory it was all a pretense you see because they didn't want people to panic when they brought them in here this p patch of that you see here this piece of grass was actually long along here was a fence beyond this fence along the road walked the people either to the sauna to live or they came the other way from the ramp and the crematorium over there which is crematorium iv the people were told to leave all their stuff behind that they're going to be disinfected they're going to be uh taking into the camp and they didn't realize what was well they thought people were having a bath a shower because it said to the showers please leave your clothes neatly in a bundle and bundle your shoes together so that they don't get lost but this was just to help us here to sort out the remains i don't remember this tree but at the bottom there was this enormous heap of of all the stuff that the people brought our job was to get a wheelbarrow full of stuff take it into one of the working barracks and everything was sorted out i think these are the remains of of the canada commando huts the toilets were away from the blocks and we were permitted to use the toilets believe it or not it had a door and you were for one thing you had a privacy to sit on the toilet now this toilet it was situated somewhere at the back here and possibly the next block had the toilet too and this was my very favorite spot that when i found some jewelry or some gold i was determined that whatever i find is not going to to be handed over to the germans swallowed it i buried it not for myself but to first of all to preserve it because this gold and the jewelry that was found here was very useful to to the men so that they could buy ammunition because we knew that sooner or later there had to be an uprising and somehow it had to be paid for now david where you're standing now is the foundation of my block where i actually lived now in front of it here was this tiny little patch of lawn and that really was lavon i'm not joking it was alone right it was a glorious summer and we we i was on night shift so during the day when i didn't sleep i sat here on this lawn sunbathing with all the screams around what are people walking past with a chimney smoking but we lay down here and we were sunbathing and it was so hot that we were splashing ourselves with water which we had access to somebody went over to the sauna got a bucket of water poured it over and we were laughing and joking sunbathing here now you were lying i was lying here and i was watching over to this chromatory over there you saw the ss man the extermination squad then did the actual killing you know the actual gassing so now somewhere there there was a ladder you could see it when you were lying here and up up this sms man climbed up the ladder with a tin of gas which he had in his hand and through the skylight he just dropped in uh this tin and then he quickly ran down the downs that went off he went and then a few seconds later you heard a sort of a muscle sound and those were people actually suffocating and then all of a sudden it was quiet and then soon after that you lay here and you could see actual smoke coming out of the chimney and those were the very people that were burning and the ss men used to pick up the bodies and throw them in the oven oh no no this was done by the the prisoners themselves called the zonda commando and there were i don't know how many commanders there were but they were exterminated ever so often themselves and the 12th on the commander actually blew up this very crematorium that you see here the remains of that was blown up while i was here on the 7th of october and of course we were all implicated as you know and the gold which we found helped to buy the ammunition to blow up this crematorium and do you think i could believe that there were people actually burning in there i couldn't believe it can you believe it no but people were burning and you could hear them scream but you still couldn't believe it what did you think was happening to them oh i knew i knew but i made myself believe that i didn't know i didn't want to know because if i didn't want to know i couldn't have lived one day could i people from the whole of europe were brought here now this is a graveyard now just remember that this is a graveyard people were sitting all around here waiting to die i'm looking for something i'm looking for something known as the white house at the moment i can't see anything i think we're coming now to a clearing and i think it had to be somewhere there and i passed it on my way going to see my mother and i think it's got to be somewhere here now yes i think we're coming out of the wood my mother had typhus at that time and i it was most important for me to have got into the camp to get some medicines and buy food for her because at that stage i saved her life and life of many of my friends and it was only possible if i could bring stuff in this was arranged by our couple because she was friendly with the ss woman and she was quite a sort of a reasonable ss woman who took us around here because she thought she'd give us a treat and a walk you see via woods which we could otherwise never have seen and this is how we come to be around this area because this was out of bounds you couldn't just walk along here i mean we were enclosed behind the barbed wire of canada it was only this very small group that managed to get into the main camp on the pretext of taking third-rate clothes into the camp and also in the pretext of going to see the dentist and so that's how i lost most of my teeth because i had to have my teeth extracted every time i went back into looking let's just go on it's got to be here somewhere let's see there's somewhere here there are foundations of this white house when you passed this white house all you heard was the machine but no pistols to the neck so people were lined up going in and were shot into the neck yeah now the next thing was that these bodies were burnt in certain pits at a later stage during 1944 when when all the guest albums were filled up and they couldn't cope with the amount of people being brought in here they burned bodies they burnt live people live in the pits but at some stage they burnt the bodies that were you know people that were killed off here were burned in those carried out and somewhere here there must be enormous big pits now let's just see because i passed these pits you see on the way to the camp and i think it's i think they might just be down there let's just go and have a look yeah i think sir yes well that's a pit yes yes i'm quite sure now this is where people were burnt alive david just believe it or not now if you were brought in here and you would have seen all this beautiful wood you're seeing it now in the autumn but in the spring with flowers all around girls lying on the lawns there and perhaps even having some bit of music and laughing would you think you were going to die in this pit here it's only when i had them scream did i realize they were actually burning so i can't cry over this anymore i'm afraid it's just you know beyond tears but it's a graveyard oh this is a graveyard i think this is a pit too there must be more pits there wasn't just one pit ashes must be here but time time has taken its toll and i think the ashes are down here yes look at this this is ash can you see it this is ashes look these are romaine but you remain this is bone all right put the trabeculation on the bone can you see those oh we shall wash it and then you will see if it is bone but i think it probably is yes yes it represents a small proportion of the four million from perhaps your grandparents perhaps towards the end of 1944 with the advance of the russian army the germans in common with their practice at other death camps attempted to destroy all evidence of what had taken place at auschwitz surviving prisoners began to be transported to concentration camps inside germany david you asked me how many times did my mother save my life well i will tell you when she really saved my life and that was she was working over there in in the hospital block as you know and i was working in a crematorium now one day because she was waiting for days and days and days to try and catch the camp commandant camp commandant was tesla at that time it was hess so it was kramer but that was hessler and she waited and she made a decision she was going to speak to hessler herself now this was the greatest fit that you could imagine of heroism for an ordinary prisoner to be able to get near an ss commandant now she waited apparently for days now i didn't know all this because i was working in a crematorium and somewhere here he came along and she ran out from one of these huts here she must have been hiding at the back of this last block and she saw him and of course he wasn't on his own he was he was surrounded and there were no by the ruling prisoners and you couldn't get near you had to speak via ruling prisoners anyway she apparently came up here and she said prison number 39934 begs to speak to the camp commandant and he apparently just stood you know they were a bit surprised an ordinary prisoner come to address him no and he said yes and she then said my daughter has been working at the crematorium for eight months and now their transport is leaving and i would like her to come and join me on the transport well he didn't say yes or no he just said give me her number and she said 39934 dismissed and that was it and i never heard i didn't know this you see but this saved my life he saved my life and how he saved my life i will tell you because i worked in the crematoria and there was this enormous uprising and i was there when the crematoria were being blown up and we were all implicated in this i mean we were responsible in some to some extent for the blowing up of the crematoria and that was an enormous inquiry and during roll call one of the ss women came in and called 39934 and and of course i thought right now i'm going to be killed because i knew i had i was implicated i had a lot of gold and jewelry it was all hidden and buried and somebody must have seen it so i said oh bye you know everybody knew i was going to die but instead she said to me you're going to be too be one strong so the camp commandant saved my life because i don't know he just he just sent a message get prisoner 39934 to come back here i don't know it's the way my mother spoke this perfectly admired heroism admired terrorism and they they admire the fact that she spoke at the most perfect german and she came in a more civilized way and she didn't beg she simply said it straight out she didn't crawl she was very determined she said we'd been here almost two years and he was impressed by this that somebody especially an old lady like her old well enough for 50s could have lived here so long he was impressed i think and so he so my number was called out and i have not met anyone from this particular canada commander that is alive because i think following this inquiry they were all guests and so i think i'm the only one of this particular canada commander that is alive today the freight trucks and cattle wagons that had brought so many men women and children to the gas chambers now began to take surviving prisoners away from auschwitz but leaving auschwitz didn't bring an end to their suffering they were shunted from one overcrowded camp to another when there were no trains they were forced to march over hundreds of miles in conditions of deprivation and brutality worse than anything they had experienced in auschwitz kitty left auschwitz in a freight truck on november 11 1944 it was one month before her 18th birthday of the 100 women who were transported with her only 12 were alive by the time liberation came in april 1945 amongst those 12 were kitty and her mother had the impression on leaving auschwitz that there could never be a place like auschwitz uh however i was not prepared for the death march which was to come the worst of the death march was that many of us had to throw away our belongings because we couldn't carry them and so very soon we were saturated and cold and wet and there was absolutely no food distributed and we had to fend for ourselves and only the people who had been to auschwitz and had were prepared to risk uh their lives at every single moment in in order to obtain some sort of food could survive and i thought that i could not possibly live through these last six months uh having seen many of the very tough girls who had been in auschwitz two years and even three years um lag behind during the death march um and and were simply clobbered to death by being left behind and we were all clubbed of course i was clobbered on the head and the rifle but um butts have been pushed into my back but yet there was always someone who picked me up and pulled me along if they had any strengths but what really kept me going was seeing my friends who were lying at the roadside and being shot by the guards and and my obsession for revenge became more intense and this is what kept me going not so much my physical strengths but this obsession for revenge the range of my friends some hours before liberation on the very day of liberation one ss officer came into the camp no one knew why because he no longer gave orders he just came appeared in the camp and immediately a whole mob of people threw themselves at him and tore his uniform and i was terribly weak at that time and i was just watching the ss stores just across the electrified fans and there were all these marvelous loaves you see staring uh staring at me and of course i knew i couldn't touch the electrified fence but i knew that that moment of liberation this is where i was going to go for bread nothing else um however that there were more he was mobbed this ss officer and i crept in from the back and noticed that he had a dagger and at that point i just grabbed this dagger and i made off eventually he broke loose and and and he escaped through the gates and we realized then that the end must be very close but we're still waiting for this very big explosion um well uh i cannot remember many many hours we were just sort of sitting looking at at the loaves you see and at this bread everybody just was watching literally watching the bread um and and waiting uh for a signal that uh the electricity had been cut and that one could actually get to this bread although we we didn't know where where the allies were but you know we thought well once you what you can get across at least you'll have some food because it it could have been perhaps 10 days without food in that time and i i do remember someone coming up to me and and saying well uh there's some very strange soldiers wandering around outside and and i didn't take any notice and you know i was just watching the bread and waiting for someone to say you know the electricity is cut and you you can go and get some of this bread and then eventually of course the the gate swung open and these soldiers came in and and you know most of us were very dazed to to realize what had happened we would never seen these particular uniforms before and of course they were the americans who who came to liberate us but at point of liberation i made a dive uh for for the bread that i remember very clearly that a lot of uh people were very weak and could hardly walk and they threw themselves at at the soldiers but i threw myself at the ss stores and i came out with a handful of bread and and i was mopped you say and i succeeded and just having a little tiny piece of bread which i ran with immediately to my mother and we just sort of had a had something to eat after 10 days and that was the most fantastic feeling perhaps the best feeling of all just being able to have some food my intense feeling of revenge wouldn't leave me and i felt it wouldn't be satisfied until i've actually used the dagger and killed the very first german that i would come into contact with and with this in mind i followed the mop through the town of salsvadel on a rampage not of looting but of destruction and hammered and chopped everything up in every house not taking away a single item i didn't have any clothes i i wore nothing underneath my one prison dress and and it was everything to be had but i simply was not interested all i wanted to do is destroy everything in my awake and use my dagger in the first german because purely to avenge my friends that i have seen died during the death march or the post-auschwitz period more than anything else this this is this was so intense and having got into a house the place looked deserted of course the population realized that there was a small concentration camp outside and they had disappeared but we ran into one house which appeared empty um ran into the basement where you could hear sound of voices children crying and there was a a group of people and children were huddled in in in a corner and there was a woman and i think there was a man and and a mop of people we all rush into this basement and i had this dagger and everybody said now come on you know here they are you're going to kill them now and then suddenly there i was and some i found i couldn't actually throw this dagger and in this this split second it it came to me that well if i was going to use this dagger well then most certainly the germans have succeeded in in influencing me and i'm no better than they are if i was going to use this dagger in exactly the same way as as someone may have used on me and i saw this group of people in the corner thinking that well perhaps they are innocent and and i was in the same sort of situation not so long ago huddled in the corner frightened and and there was all this mob screaming behind me you know we'll throw it and and so eventually i i threw it and it hit a door and i i threw it the other way and and i threw myself to the ground and and i found a a tremendous sense of relief because in this split second i i suddenly realized um well it changed me into a completely different person i it fizzled out in fact my my uh desire for for revenge in this split second 1946 after a year of working as interpreters in a displaced persons camp in north germany kitty and her mother set out to create a new life for themselves in england of their old life in poland nothing remained in bialsko every one of the large and prosperous felix family had been exterminated carl felix kitty's father had been traced by the gestapo arrested and shot her brother robert's attempt to reach england ended in russia he was killed fighting with the red army at stalingrad kitty's mother would never see poland again instead she and kitty traveling with new papers that still recorded their auschwitz numbers came and settled in birmingham in 1947 kitty took up radiography at birmingham's royal orthopedic hospital at the polish club she met ralph hart the polish emigre who had arrived in england just before the war in 1949 they were married in the fifties there were children david and peter kitty's mother lived with the family until her death in 1974. she had survived the years on the run and the years in auschwitz she had lost one family in bialsko but had lived long enough to see another grow up and take root in birmingham my mother was the tower of strength behind me and encouraging me as well as many young people to to go on youth was on my side when i was in auschwitz it was very much easier for the young people to manipulate the system than for the older people because they the older people being more mature thought about more about the situations whereas the young purely uh lived by animal instinct and and they didn't uh have to think that i i think that the younger person is the more cunning uh and the the cunning side of personality fades out as you get older and you're more cunning when you're little and and find ways and means of outwitting people and manipulating uh a system in a simpler way than when you are mature and you begin to rationalize and think about things although a lot of older people have survived it was very much easier for people of my age to to survive it was very easy to lose the desire to live you saw this in people's sheer way of the way they walked they began to walk slowly and and developed a kind of a vacant expression on their faces and it was a gradual process but once this process took over you know these people were doomed and you could not save them anymore but um my mother was absolutely fantastic she she worked in the hospital block and she could recognize this expression in people's faces and and and used to talk to them she couldn't give them any physical compass but by sheer talking to them she gave them this extra will to live perhaps through another day during the eight months that i worked in the canada commando i saw such a vast number of people being brought in and being killed off that the the sheer number of people lost its meaning it was only when i saw an individual act of of of of cruelty or or if something happened to one person or one child that it suddenly brought this whole realization of what was happening there and and it took an enormous effort constant effort uh to drive this thing out of my mind uh as long as there was a sea of people it it it lost its meaning but i must emphasize that it it was uh if something happened to one person this is what hit me hardest uh a child would pick flowers uh but this particularly is in my mind and and and or a child was playing with toys and the mother um uh tried to um uh um pacify a child perhaps knowing full well that uh preparing it for this you know just trying to uh instill some calmness into a child um and and perhaps the ss would come and tear this child away and and pick it up by its head or by its legs and and and throw it onto the side and just kill it in in front of the mother this is a kind of perhaps incidence which i found very difficult to erase from my mind to keep up a role of detachment we pretended to live in in a different world uh i remember a group of us uh actually um uh preparing a play and and in in this play most of the actors uh in the play were the ss and what we were going to do to them after the war uh and and also many of the plays were staged of in beautiful surroundings were pretending was you know having a banquet and uh and all these marvelous sardines and wines and sausages on the table which we which would you know pictured in our minds and and we pretended that we were in a different world also i remember finding a mouth organ and one or two instruments and we actually formed a little orchestra and and and tried to compose some music and pretended we were uh giving a concert to nobody you know just to ourselves but just pre and at the same time uh not looking what was happening not looking over the shoulder and yet hearing screams of people just behind us going into the gas chambers but pretending that we we're elsewhere uh this was of course while we're not working because for a long period of time i was on night shift and i watched this throughout the day having slept certain a number of hours i was allowed to actually some base on on this lawn and this is where we sort of staged these little plays i think the people who were queuing up to the gas chambers had a feeling that there was some sort of life for them because they saw us uh perhaps well fed and in in in in in reasonable condition and that it gave them hope of a better life although the the whole atmosphere must have been very sinister and and i couldn't understand how they could uh um see the burning and and exactly what interpretation they would have had of of of smoking chimneys exactly what was being produced in this place it was certainly a weird sort of situation but i think it was better to to um for them to have a feeling of of calm rather than to produce panic by uh saying you know you you're now going into a gas chamber why don't you fight uh it would have had the opposite effect because everybody would have died it would have not saved anyone and people would have died of violent death rather than perhaps die in a more more peaceful way so i don't think there would have been any contribution in in warning people of what was to come i saw the people go in at one end and i saw the ashes at the other end i saw the smoke coming out of the chimneys and i could smell the the burning flesh and yet i kept on telling myself it wasn't really happening because i could understand that if you were going to take it in uh something you would have some sort of a mental breakdown and i i under no circumstances was going to allow myself to have this mental breakdown because i saw people who who tried to tell me look you can see what's happening and the next day i saw what was happening to them you see they committed suicide because they took this in and i refused to take it into my brain and it was so incredible that i couldn't my brain wouldn't accept it seeing people going in one end and and knowing that they were coming out as ashes ten minutes later the other end and hearing the screams and i would not allow myself to for my brain to take this in so i i just pretended i didn't see it when i visited the canada commander section of the camp i was very much afraid whether i will be unable to blot out these events again as i have succeeded before it was all brought back to me very much very clearly very vividly and this is what i was afraid of that i will perhaps at this stage uh being more mature and and thinking more about it will be unable to detach myself as i had done previously and it has affected me very deeply because i i i did see it all very vividly but again my mind has been able to begin it has taken weeks and weeks after my return from the visit uh for me to settle down and begin to blot out and detach myself looking back at auschwitz for me it was a worthwhile experience something that i wouldn't want to go through twice in my lifetime but something i'm extremely grateful i haven't missed because of the things it had taught me and other things that i can apply to to my everyday normal lifestyle even if it's sort of been you know five years ago everyone looks different somehow nice and still okay little breath please let your breath out quite still we're done now good fine thank you very much i do my own thing as it were and i will not be allowed to be influenced in bringing up my sons in my ordinary activities or people may think that i'm a freak and i perhaps exercise which is a ski with my time of life i should be sitting about a knitting for my grandchildren and i don't care what people think about this i do my own thing because i like to do the opposite of what people expect me to do [Music] well i think another reason why people think i'm an oddity is because of my extra activities that i tend to pursue such as i always feel i have to have a challenge and i have to beat a system and if there isn't anything to beat well i'll look for it in order to beat it no matter what it is even if it means beating my own ability physical ability to to do a certain physical accomplishment for instance i have to prove to myself that i still have a certain amount of self-discipline and i've always have to set out to prove this to myself and i can only prove it by doing the things i do not like doing necessarily but i feel i must do them in order to to have the self-discipline and retain it um and and because of this i do enormous amount of physical exercise which is very often quite unpleasant and i don't like it i i do it first thing in the morning when i most certainly don't feel like doing it and i i set myself out to to do almost the impossible uh by saying well today i must do 100 knee bends but tomorrow i'm going to do 200 even if it kills me but i prove to myself it's got to be done because it's good for my mind for self-discipline or i will swim a mile knowing it's the most boring thing to do but it is a way of proving that i have still got this discipline it's very difficult to hate a whole nation you'd have to find some people that you could focus your hate on there must be some degrees of hate whom do you hate less or more and if i was going to hate well my children were going to hate the next generation of the germans who are as innocent perhaps as i was you

Channel: Our Life

Views: 390,338

Keywords: our life, documentary, world documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, history, kitty hart, holocaust, auschwitz

Id: QIbIn18ND6I

Length: 88min 44sec (5324 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021