"Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, where more than a million people mainly Jews were murdered." "People with families and friends, ordinary people robbed of their future." "Each had their own unique story of how they came to be at Auschwitz." "Only a minority survived and today, decades later, and today, decades later, very few can explain what happened there as witness to its human terror." "Kitty hart-moxon was 17 years old when she arrived at Auschwitz-birkenau in April 1943." "Now, she travels back one last time to answer the questions of a new generation." "My name is kitty hart-moxon and I'm a holocaust survivor." "Designed as a factory of death, no one was intended to survive." "Let alone describe its inhumanity to a world not yet ready to listen." "No one wanted to know, no one wanted to hear what I have to say but I made a commitment that the people don't want to hear but I'm going to make sure don't want to hear but I'm going to make sure" "that they will." "I've been here many times but I really wanted to come with two girls who are my age when I was here." "I want to show them the struggle for survival." "What were your first impressions of the camp?" "There was just the most incredible mud and then we saw, like, a glow in a distance and soon when we got there, we saw ghost-like figures with shaved heads, we saw ghost-like figures with shaved heads," "staggering in tattered clothes with great big eyes, screaming in all languages and being beaten and we thought," ""my God, is this what's going to happen to us?"" "I've known kitty since I was born." "I've known about her story since I was little so I've grown up with the influence of it." "What did you first see when you got off the train?" "Alsatian dogs." "They were barking, trying to get at us." "And I wanted to try and understand a bit better, and understand a bit better, how she held in these conditions and how she managed to survive for so long." "And we're walking into women's camp now." "I met kitty for the first time after the school tour she gave us." "And I went up and asked some questions to her." "And I'm just kind of nervous and excited because I want to see it from a different perceptive." "I may have seen it in class." "And you see these stamps?" "These are the chimneys of the wooden barracks." "What happens to you when you're in those formative years, age 13 to 16, age 13 to 16, it shapes you and your character for the whole of your life." "Auschwitz is where my grandma feels she belongs and it always calls her back." "Kitty hart was one of the first survivors to tell her story." "She gives us access to that experience with the power of her words." "You have to treat what kitty says almost like music," "I hear what she says." "And I also try to listen and I also try to listen to what she has left unsaid." "And see this crossroad?" "The crossroad was the crossroad to life or death." "The very fact that kitty was an eyewitness and can say, "this is what I saw,"" "actually ensures that it cannot be denied that the intentionality of the perpetrations is clear and it is indisputable that what she saw is what happened." "And as you walked, you got stuck in this mud, and all these people were falling around in the mud." "And all these people were falling around in the mud." "You cannot stand there and simply say, "this is okay."" "This should never have happened." "It should never have existed, and as a human being, thinking about the experience of others, you just realize," ""this is no place for anybody to have ever been."" "Just prior to invasion, my father decided we've got to get out." "My father decided we've got to get out." "My brother fled with his friends to the Russian side." "They were asked to join the army, the Polish army within a Russian unit." "And eventually was killed in the battle of stalingrad." "So my father, my mother, and my grandmother, we got on the last train." "The train just took us to lublin and that's where everyone was thrown out and that's where we landed up." "And we were taken to a part of the town and we were taken to a part of the town which became the lublin ghetto." "It wasn't possible to survive in Poland as a Jewish person without relying on somebody else." "So kitty's mother, in a time of crisis, what does she do?" "She started teaching English to people." "In doing that, she creates a relationship with a priest." "Priest told my mother," ""if you come to a point where there's no way out, just come and I'll see what I can do."" "The priest then is able to help and put his life on the line and put his life on the line to provide them documents to get them out." "We had to part from my father." "That priest said no way could we survive all three of us together." "My father was to go and work in the sawmill somewhere, we didn't know where." "And my mother and I, we were to go into the center of lublin." "Why?" "Because they were rounding up the Polish population as well." "And when they sorted them out, they took them to work in factories in Germany in factories in Germany and the priest said," ""that's what we've got to do." "We're going to get out of the country."" "And makes me this transport and get into Germany." "And they actually checked documents but our documents were in order, you see." "And before my mother and I collected our thoughts, we were in the train." "And landed up far, far inside Germany." "It was very difficult for Jews to be able to hide within the Polish population within the Polish population because of small cultural and linguistic things, such as accents would--could creep in and change the perception of you as being truly a Polish citizen." "Well, what happened was because they suspected us, one of them reported us to the authorities and that was our downfall." "Kitty was arrested for illegal entry into Germany as leokadia dobrzynska and sent for interrogation." "The Nazis wanted to know the source the Nazis wanted to know the source of their false documents." "The irony with the Nazis was they could create death camps and murder Jews with impunity but if somebody broke a law, they had to go through the penal system which was complete nonsense because they could have simply deported them" "to Auschwitz as Jews." "But because the legal system didn't allow it, they eventually were deported to Auschwitz with a death penalty for immigration charges." "So we were told we're going to be executed by firing squad." "There was a brick wall there was a brick wall and we had to face the wall with our arms up like that, standing, facing the wall." "And then there was a huge explosion and I thought, "God, I'm--I've been hit."" "There was a great laughter." "They said, "oh, no, we're not going to kill you." ""What's going to happen, we're going to commute you" ""of death sentence" ""to life imprisonment in Auschwitz" ""and we're going to hand you over to the camp." ""They'll find out where these documents came from."" "So we're in a train that was specially converted so we're in a train that was specially converted to transport prisoners and we travelled 48 hours standing before we arrived in Auschwitz." "But we had absolutely no idea where we were, it was dark." "What did you first see when you got off the train?" "Well, the thing opened up and" "Oh, you heard an awful lot of noise." "Were you scared?" "Well, we were scared of the dogs." "And then the great big women with whips." "And then the great big women with whips." "And they were whipping everyone and urging everyone to run, run, run, everything at running pace." "Suddenly, there was a weird kind of stench and the closer we got, the worse the stench became." "My mother--my mother said, "what a curious place there." ""Can you smell?" "Can you smell roasting meat?"" "I said, "yes, I can."" "She said "do you think they're roasting chickens here this time of the night?"" "This time of the night?"" "I said, "I don't know."" "Kitty and her mother was sent to birkenau, the largest of the 44 camps in the Auschwitz system, where they were processed and sent to quarantine." "When did you first stay in a wooden barrack?" "Well, this was a quarantine, okay?" "So the first night, we were pushed into here." "Did you find somewhere to sleep?" "Well, we squeezed in somewhere here." "I was incredibly cold that night." "I was incredibly cold that night because we were 48 hours without food and I slept all night next to a woman." "And she started speaking to me in German, it turned out, she was a German gypsy." " Right." " During the early morning, while she was talking to me, she looked at my hand, she took my hand, she said, "give me your hand."" "And she said, "you know, you're going to come out."" "And the next thing that happened, whistles blew suddenly, we're still in dark." "And everybody would say "rouse, rouse, out."" "And because this was quarantine, and because this was quarantine, we didn't know." "Yeah." "And I shook this woman, you know." "Yeah." "And she didn't move." "And I said to my mother, "she's cold, she's dead."" "And I said, "you know, you're cold, I'm cold." ""We need to strip her and we need to have everything she's got."" "Surviving Auschwitz was virtually impossible and there was certainly no way you can say," ""if you did this then this would happen."" "It was a matter of luck and chance of being in the right place at the right time but there were some circumstances but there were some circumstances and some strategies that kind of worked." "That came to me that night that actually that's the way to do it." "That if you do have the people that had died you got to take everything off of them because it's not good to them, that was it." "You had to do what you needed to do to survive and that was taking from the dead, that's what it meant." "Not in the history of mankind has there been industrial killing on this scale." "If something happened once, there's absolutely no reason why it can't happen again." "There's absolutely no reason why it can't happen again." "In 1943, kitty was assigned to work on a new rail line into birkenau, called the ramp." "In 1944, she watched as transports of Jews from Hungary started to arrive." "What was the importance of the ramp?" "People arrived in cattle tracks and sometimes seven or ten trains would arrive in same 24 hours." "Would arrive in same 24 hours." "And people were sealed in almost airtight, just a little bit of air coming through the slats." "Sometimes the trains were sealed here for hours before they were allowed to unload." "Did people die in the trains?" "Yeah, a lot of people died before they arrived here." "Some people traveled seven days before they arrived here." "Did anyone have any idea what was happening when they got off the train?" "People had not the foggiest idea what was going to happen." "Of course there were people coming from the ghettos." "So they didn't expect anything, so they didn't expect anything, you know, good, obviously." "Everything was very nice and quiet because they didn't want people to panic, so loud speakers were here, telling people," ""well, there's a lot of typhus here" ""and so we are all going to be disinfected" ""and we've got to split," ""went from women and women with children." ""Leave your luggage, leave your luggage, you're going to get your luggage later."" "And then soldiers came, "right, left," ""men this way, women this way," ""women with children on one side," ""women with children on one side," ""younger people or younger," ""you can go that way." ""Oh, you're older," ""you take your child with you, it'll be fine." "You take your child, we're not going to split you up."" "It was shocking to see that you stood in the exact same place as those people did once." "At the ramp, women with children and the elderly were sent directly to their death and if you were young and able-bodied and if at that period of time they needed workers, then you were chosen for slave labor" "then you were chosen for slave labor which essentially meant that you were chosen to die slowly, not to die immediately in the gas chambers." "Let me tell you, at this point, families were split, never ever saw one another again." "So, some of the men were taken this way." "Uh-hmm." " Okay?" "Some of the girls that were selected to go into the camp were taken through there." "We were just told to go that way, we were just told to go that way, and you know the road there," " where does that go?" " The gas chambers." "That's it." "What happened when you arrived at camp?" "Well, we were taken to a building like this which we didn't know what it was but it was called the sauna, not like you and I understand it, the processing place." "And the first thing that happened to you, you were stripped." "Everything was taken from you, you were smeared with a green fluid, your hair was shaved everywhere." "Your hair was shaved everywhere." "That was then packaged and shipped off for processing." "Hair was used both to create cloth and to line submarines and its detonators." "And then you were tattooed and believe me, that was when you felt you were no longer..." "It was painful." "...The same person." "When that tattoo was placed on your arm, you weren't what your parents had given you as your name, you became that number and that was your identification completely taken away." "Not only is it a disgusting thing to do." "Not only is it a disgusting thing to do to human beings but that's my grandma and they wanted to turn her into an animal." "Without your hair and without your clothing, you lose something very distinctive about you." "And there are people who remember at that point that they looked ridiculous." "It was hard to imagine how she survived." "Every corner she turned, there was something trying to stop her from living." "First of all, survival depended." "First of all, survival depended on the place of work." "If you were working outside and, you know, the commandos which are work parties, you hadn't had the prayer to survive for long." "The other thing you couldn't survive was without a pair of shoes." "Well, the problem was that you were issued wooden clogs." "Your clogs would get stuck in the muds." "Your feet would rank, they would get infected, you were dead." "If you didn't have your bowl, you were dead." "If you didn't have your bowl, you were dead." "Because nobody would give you their bowl." "So survival depended on if you could not think about anything, just have a tunnel vision and think like an animal." "Just picture yourself, what does an animal do?" "What does an animal need?" "Well, it doesn't need very much just to live but the first thing it needs is to get away from the predators." "Get away from all these people that are trying to kill you." "That are trying to kill you." "There were capos who were prison foremen and they became more cruel than the German masters themselves." "But how do you get away from these people?" "Any of the ruling." "Could come up to you and kill you." "And consequently you couldn't figure out a strategy for survival." "In Auschwitz, there was no why, it was done by whim." "Did you know that the wooden sheds." "Did you know that the wooden sheds were actually meant for 52 horses and so they put these bunk things up there." "And there were a thousand people in there?" "And a thousand people inside, that's right." "What happened?" "Did--first thing in the morning when you woke up?" "You were woken up with the sound of whistles roughly around about 4:00 in the morning." "So roll calls took place twice a day and roll calls was one of the greatest terrors of the camp." "Whistles blew and everybody screams" ""out, out, out, schnell, rouse, rouse."" "Total chaos, a thousand people had to rush out of this door." "And you see the grounds, you're looking at grass, but you must look at mud, the whole thing was just one sea of mud." "I've always said, "if you found a blade of grass, what would you do with it?"" "You'd eat it." "Oh." "So people were just staggering around the mud so people were just staggering around the mud but of course you had to stand to attention." "Selection didn't just take place on arrival at Auschwitz, it was a daily occurrence." "In fact, anytime the prisoners were together, if anybody at any point in time tipped over into that place where they were no longer useful to the Nazis, they could simply be selected and sent them to the gas chamber." "People just collapsed and died." "Yeah." "Died of tiredness, of exhaustion, of shock." "Did you ever have to collect the corpses after roll call?" "Yes, yes." "Yes, you did?" "Yes, yes." "Yes, you did?" "Oh, yes." "At that--when I was in the liechenkommando, this is what we did." "Well, I don't know if people realize but when you are hungry, hunger is a total obsession." "You're just thinking hunger, hunger," "I must have something to eat," "I must--if I don't eat something, I'll die." "It depended where you were in line as to how much nutrition you got." "As to how much nutrition you got." "If you're at the beginning of the line, you got pure water." "If you're at the end of the line, you had a problem because they might run out of food." "And if you knew the person who was ladling out the food, then in one sense they dug deep and they got the stuff in the soup that landed at the bottom, whether it's a potato or a carrot or something." "Hunger is the worst thing." "Hunger is the worst thing that anybody can experience, I think." "Did you stay in a bunk like this?" "If you were lucky, there was one straw mattress." "And one blanket for eight people." "How did eight people sleep here?" "Like sardines, next to each other." " That's it, you got it." " Yeah." "Head to feet." "So, you had somebody's feet in your face." "Yeah." "Did people die in the night then?" "Did you have any experience with that?" "Yes." "People died in the night." "That's right." "Yes." "People died in the night." "That's right." "If somebody died next to you, all of a sudden, you found your own body heat going out." "You needed the warmth of the other body in order to stay" "I wouldn't say warm but to stay less cold during the frigid nights." "Suppose you need to go to the toilet at night." "There's no toilets in here." "( Well, a ) There are no toilets," "( b ) You were not allowed out." "The barracks had buckets." "Now, a veteran prisoner would try to judge when to go to the bathroom at night when to go to the bathroom at night by such a way as listening very carefully to what happened to the prisoner before you" "to make sure that you weren't the last to fill the bucket because if you were last to fill the bucket, you had to take it out and empty it." "You look at that." " Yes." " You see what this is?" "Yeah, it's mud." "That's just mud." "That's right." "And very often there was a mess here as well because you couldn't get to the bucket." "You had to permission to even during the night you had to permission to even during the night to use the bucket." "So, those were your living quarters." "It was just so horrific to think that anybody could stuff all these people in this tiny space." "I have a place to go to the toilet and I have a place to sleep and I have place to have food and I know that I will get it." "The Nazis made sure in every way possible you didn't get what you needed." "Something to eat, somewhere to sleep, and I'm afraid if you don't mind the language, somewhere to shit." "Now, what I'm going to show you is the latrines." "Okay?" "Now, see that entrance?" "Uh-hmm." "Thousands, thousands had to get through this entrance and of course there was a functionary prisoner in charge and wouldn't let you in, but did you know," "I worked there at one stage." "So, let's just show you what it was like." "How did you get the job to work here?" "Well, I had to buy myself to work." "I thought it'd be a good place." "At least I have access to the lavatory." "Yeah." "And it was horrible." "Yeah." "And it was horrible." "There's nothing further from what a 16-year-old girl would want to be doing with her life than having her arms in shit." "And yet, for her that was a privilege because when she was in the scheisskommando, it meant that she wasn't digging a ditch." "She didn't have somebody flogging her to death because she couldn't dig fast enough." "She wasn't actually freezing to death because she was inside and what's more, the Nazis were nowhere near that place." "So, being in this scheisskommando was a 16-year-old's dream in Auschwitz." "Was a 16-year-old's dream in Auschwitz." "So, that was an open sewer." "Thousands of women going in there, you had, like, two or three people to a hole because you didn't have it to yourself and then when people were finishing, you had to dig all that stuff out," "so everything had to come out." "Think of the idea that you have 35,000 people using these latrines." "Using these latrines." "So it was designed again to dehumanize the people, to degrade them to make them live in their own filth." "Why dehumanize these people if they're gonna kill them anyhow?" "Because if people look like a lump of feces, then it's easy to flush it down the toilet." "And what would happen if you couldn't get in, how would you go to the toilet?" "You had your bowl." "Yeah." "And your bowl was virtually your food or your toilet." "Was virtually your food or your toilet." "Uh-hmm." "Yeah." "The problem was washing it out, right?" "Yeah." "There was no water." "How did you wash it out?" "No water." "In the winter you had snow, you can wipe it out." "In the summer, it wasn't so." "And you couldn't do anything on the ground because if somebody-- They could see you..." "And they're in trouble." "Well, not only they're in trouble, you got killed." "Yeah." "Full stop." "And we haven't got the words to describe the intense cold." "Well, I was thinking of penguins actually, how did penguins survive in the antarctic?" "How did penguins survive in the antarctic?" "Well, if you look at them, they huddle together and try to have body heat from each other." "Well, that's exactly what it was." "So that was trying to overcome the cold." "It must have been horrific to have to stand still in the cold with no shoes, hours and hours on end, when she was hungry, starving, tired, and there was nothing she could do about that." "During selection, that was most feared, because then you knew, at random, you could be selected to die." "So fear, that was the greatest fear, selections." "What's this block here with the bars?" "Well, this is called block 25." "You see the number here and you see the bars" " on the windows?" " Yeah." "Well, that's the only block that had the bars." "It's called the death block." "Block 25 was the place where inmates once they had been selected where inmates once they had been selected were sent to await death." "The Nazis, of course, because they were operating the campus efficiently as possible, wouldn't simply select two or three inmates and then send them to the gas chamber because it wasn't worth turning the gas chamber on." "So what would happen is they would collect several hundreds of these prisons who are at the end of their usefulness and then dispatch them to the gas chamber when it was convenient." "I'm going to explain to you what's inside here." "I'm going to explain to you what's inside here." "Everybody kept away from here because once selections were taking place in all these blocks, people would have to undress and turn around in front of the ss doctor." "And if they didn't like your skin or if you are too thin or if you couldn't walk, they would take a mark, and mark up your number." "Did anyone survive once in there?" "No, no, nobody survived." "No." "No, you could never get anyone out." "Once they were here, that was the end." "You are very taken aback by it." "Kitty told me that they had no clothes kitty told me that they had no clothes and you could see that their hands were through the window begging for food or water or anything." "The reason block 25 is such a prominent place in her memory is of course because all of the inmates in the women's camp could see it." "It was right alongside their own barracks." "They could hear the desperation of the women that were in there, knowing that there was literally no way out." "Of course, everybody kept away from me and when they opened up the doors..." "It smelled." "The stench went right it smelled." "The stench went right through the camp." "Well, language was a big, big problem because the camp had its own language." "And it was actually a combined German and Polish sort of slang." "For instance, the woman who was in charge of the block was called the..." "So okay, so if you didn't know the German word, you wouldn't have known what it was." "Her helpers were called is a room in German ...is a room in German but was kind of made into Polish." "It was a slang that you had to understand." "And that was the problem with the greeks, the Italians, the Hungarians, they just couldn't understand." "If you didn't, again, you couldn't survive." "I lost my friends all the time and that was the worst of it that you've had your friends, you established the contact, you established the contact, you already had someone that was" "Had access and you could get this and you could get that and you could get a bit of food and then all of a sudden, they were gone." "Just having somebody that you knew that could help you in a given moment in time could be the difference between life and death." "Everybody needed the friendship or the sense of "I need you,"" "to be able to mediate a situation that wasn't designed to allow you to live." "To allow you to live." "What were the white things on these fences?" "Now, if you look at these white things, that's high-tension electric fencing." "You were very, very cautious not to go too close." "Because if you did, you committed suicide." "People commit suicide often?" "That was the easiest way out." "You just touched a fence and you were dead." "And if you touched this person, you were dead as well because electricity would pass through your body to the next person." "To the next person." "Or you were shot from the watch towers if you came too close." "So yes, people went on the fence, yes." "There was universal word which was called "organizing."" "And that amounts to getting hold of." "Didn't matter what it was, whether you bought it, whether it was stolen, whether you found it, it was all one word and it was called "organizing."" "I organized some bread." "I organized a pair of shoes." "I organized something to wear." "I organized something to wear." "So what did women do?" "They always tried to get two or three together." "Four was the best." "One working in one place, one working perhaps had access to the toilet, like I did at one time, one had access to water, one perhaps had access to some clothes, to the sauna, and that's how you exchanged" "and that was the mutual support that was absolutely vital to survival." "If you didn't have that, you couldn't survive." "We're going to block 12." "We're going to block 12 because all that was part of sick bay." "Did you come here a lot then?" "I tried to hide there just to conserve my energy." "My mother sometimes would hide me somewhere." "Kitty's mother was a very highly educated and cultured woman." "Once she got into the holocaust, her knowledge of German was gonna be really important to her." "She had both the physical attributes and the mental attributes to be able to work away through very difficult circumstances." "And my mother worked right throughout the time." "And my mother worked right throughout the time." "She was working there." "She was supposed to be a nurse but because you couldn't nurse anyone, my mother psychologically tried to keep people alive by simply begging them to live another day." "Working in the hospital meant that her mother was able to help kitty." "Between the two of them, they could work together to enable" "Just increasing the chances of survival a little." "My mother was working in an infirmary, an infectious block." "If someone that had typhus, I was on my mother's block." "If someone that had typhus, I was on my mother's block." "And I was lucky enough to be told I'd be able to stay and work within the, you know, within the infirmary." "So, I was a glorified cleaner but really my function was to bring the bodies out that died, you know, people died during the night and some of the bodies were up there." "So, two of us had to climb up there and get the--get the corpses down, dragged them all the way and stack them up outside." "And I actually hid some of my friends here." "And I actually hid some of my friends here." "I managed to bring them in here because I had access but I told them it was the most dangerous place to be because nearly every day, the ss doctors would come in and carry out selections." "They would sit people up, sometimes they had to jump." "If they couldn't jump over this heating channel they'd be killed." "Of course the sick couldn't get down so the ss doctors would just, with a chalk, mark up a bunk." "Well, of course we know what happened." "Well, of course we know what happened." "Dr. Mengele came and said," ""today, we're emptying this block,"" "which meant, today they're all going to die." "Did they know what was happening?" "Well, they already knew what was happening." "So, we had to stand like this." "So, in a circle, holding." "And that's when I lost most of my friends and that broke me." "I never got over that." "My mother realized what was going on and from somewhere she appeared and from somewhere she appeared and she just grabbed me and then pulled me away." "And at that point, you know, we thought what was going to happen next." "It's all empty." "They were gone and I was on my own." "There was a place called kanada named after the country Canada which was the place in which they confiscated all of the valuables." "They sorted it." "They inventoried it." "They then shipped it back to Germany for use." "They then shipped it back to Germany for use." "They came and said" ""we're going to ask you to join the kanada."" "My mother said, "there'll be food there." ""You must do it." "There will be food." "You'll find it among the clothes."" "And so I said, "yes, okay."" "And that's how I got to the kanada." "I'm going to tell you why I brought you here." "Thousands upon thousands of people were brought in" " with all their belongings." " Yeah." "Kitty really wanted to tell the story of kanada." "For her, it's about evidence." "Each one of those suitcases belonged to a human being and each one of those clothes was worn by one of those human beings." "What she's trying to get across to is" "I think is just the scale of the killing based on the scale of that side." "There were 30 sheds here." "There were 30 sheds here all full of people's belongings." "And we were here to do the sorting of the belongings." "How long were you working here for?" "I was here eight months." "There were two passways." "That passway at the bottom had a huge heap like three-storey high." "Everybody's things jumbled up." "All the suitcases were emptied there." "Documents, children's clothes, prams, everything was jumbled up down the bottom there and then it was taken to individual sheds and there, it was sorted." "And there, it was sorted." "My particular job was sorting nothing but men's jackets." "So I had to find these men's jackets and I couldn't always find them, because I had a certain quota that I had to make." "What happened if you didn't make the quota?" "Oh, you got punished if you didn't make the quota." "And in the shed was a long table like a trestle and you put the jackets on the trestle and you put the jackets on the trestle and you opened up all these things." "What do you think was in these jackets?" "Lots of jewelry and..." "Lots of jewelry." "Diamonds, jewelry, money of all different denominations." "Did you always give everything in or did you, sometimes, hide it and then..." "No." "If you kept one single item of any value, that was the end because there was constant inspections." "So you couldn't keep it." "And, you know, we found a lot of paper money." "And, you know, we found a lot of paper money." "Yeah." "As you can imagine." "What do you think we did with this paper money?" "Because it wasn't any good to you, you couldn't buy anything." "What did we do with it?" "You did insulation?" "No." "We made that..." "Toilet paper." "...toilet paper." "Toilet paper." "All kind of dollars, kronas, whatever currency there was, was used as toilet paper." "One of the ss who took us to the kanada made a speech and he said," ""because you are here," ""you're never going to be back in the main camp." ""Because what you see, we cannot allow it." ""Because what you see, we cannot allow it." ""There's only one way out of here, and that's through the chimney."" "What is this place?" "Well, you see these ruins." "That's all we can see." "That was known as the white house." "This was a place where the commander and the people who were working inside the gas chambers, they were working here." "We were not supposed to be here." "You see where the sauna is?" "You see where the sauna is?" "That's how close we are to the sauna." "We're not allowed to come here." "However, on about four or five occasions," "I managed to pass this place." "And the circumstances were that we took some clothes in hand carts and we were told to take those hand carts back to the main camp." "Now, the ss woman who accompanied us, she didn't like going in between the fences because she was afraid that she was gonna get electrocuted." "So she decided to take us this way." "So she decided to take us this way." "So what happens, we walked along here and we passed this place here which was the white house." "People were lined up, mostly men were lined up here, all a line of men." "Each one of them was sort of going in as we were passing by and you could hear a shot." "And we were told by the men by the commander being shot in the neck." "Could you hear it?" "You could hear the shot, yes." "You could hear a shot." "Now, the other thing is she said," ""you mustn't look around." "You walk and you keep your head down."" ""You mustn't look around." "You walk and you keep your head down."" "But we did see." "So what did we see?" "We saw some men throwing in bodies into pits and smoke coming out and fire coming out of the pits, and also some of the bodies that they couldn't burn in the ovens." "They were bringing them in here and burning them in pits." "And this is a pit there where you're seeing all this vegetation." "And I actually found one pit some years ago and found human remains, and I think it was that pit over there." "And I passed this about four or five times and I passed this about four or five times within the eight months that I was working here." "How did it make you feel when you passed?" "It was a horrific-- Horrific sight." "And we didn't even want to look, but of course we did." "You know, it was forbidden." "But it was just horrific because you were just seeing bodies being burned and the fire coming out of the pits and smoke all over the place." "There were several." "We passed several pits." "There was one here, there was another one down there." "There were many, many pits here." "But I recall that one particularly, but I recall that one particularly, very close to the sauna." "This is where people died, the killing part of Auschwitz." "I know you can't see anything." "Everything was burnt in that area to erase all traces of murder." "In 1944, five gas chambers were working at full capacity." "Were working at full capacity." "Kitty hart-moxon was placed in the kanada section at Auschwitz-birkenau, right alongside crematorium number four, where Jews were being gassed every day." "Right at the back of the fence was the gas chamber and crematorium number four." "And we had a direct view into that gas chamber." "See this wood there?" "Yeah." "That's where groups of people were sitting, small children running around." "Small children running around." "They had no idea what was going to happen." "They were herded into the crematoria." "There was an undressing room." "And people were told, "remember where you hung your clothes because you're gonna get it back."" "We had no contact because we were behind the wire and also, it was very dangerous." "You were not allowed to communicate." "It wouldn't have helped." "If we just tell these people if we just tell these people" ""well, you know, you're now going to die,"" "is that the help?" "It isn't." "We felt it's better they don't know." "And as they were herded into the gas chamber, the gas chamber was sealed." "One of the ss personnel would put on a gas mask and he would climb up on a ladder, with a tin in his hand and he would throw in some powder." "That was gas and then, all of a sudden, you just heard the scream." "You just heard the scream." "The crematorium gas chambers had huge thick walls." "You could hear people actually suffocating there and screaming and eventually, after 20 minutes, it was quiet." "The sonderkommando worked in the gas chamber reported that people climbed up on top of each other and they sort of were in a sculptural pyramid." "The gas was evacuated and then they were taken to the ovens and there was a dissecting table." "They opened them up to make sure that people did not die with something valuable inside themselves." "What birkenau essentially did was to reduce the human being to consumable by product of the killing process." "And the very next thing you saw was the man with wheelbarrows taking ash was the man with wheelbarrows taking ash and dumping it in the pond at the back." "And do you think I could actually believe it?" "Did you and your friends talk about what you saw?" "We tried not to talk about it." "We knew it was happening but, you know, we decided, we mustn't talk about it." "Don't look, don't look." "We know it's going on." "But don't look at it." "Little did the Nazis know that for months," "Jewish prisoners that had been forced to operate the crematorium were planning an insurrection on October 7, 1944." "Kitty was witness to the uprising that day." "There was just a loud noise." "And when this noise happened, we thought that was it." "My friends and I, we threw ourselves down just like that." "We bow our heads, lie flat on the ground." "We bow our heads, lie flat on the ground." "Armed resistance was not a decision whether to live, but most often, a decision how to die." "We do know that there were resistant movements." "The Polish had the resistant movement." "The Jews had the resistance movement." "But we didn't--never knew who these people were because it was so incredibly dangerous." "We didn't know it was uprising until we saw the man actually come over." "They seemed to have cut part of the fencing they seemed to have cut part of the fencing because that was electrified fence." "So they seemed to have cut the fence and run over and they tried to escape somewhere" "Yeah, I don't know where but they tried." "They were running all over." "And we were just lying down, spread-eagled, because that was the safest thing to do." "There was a general shootout, they came in on motorcycles with machine guns and I think they got most of the men." "Kitty was also a witness to the fact that Jews did not go like lambs to the slaughter." "But they were thinking about what they could do but they were thinking about what they could do to overcome the Nazis, and with absolutely no chance, whatsoever, to get a hold of the explosives to be able to overcome the tight strictures on them." "These Jewish people did that." "Following uprising was a huge was inquiry like a whole roll call with an inquiry." "And during that inquiry, one of the ss women came and called my number," "39934, 39934, and I was transferred back to the main camp and I had no idea why." "I found out later, it was my mother who managed to speak to one of the commandants and told him I've been working eight months there and that she was being evacuated and asked him if I could be evacuated," "and that's what happened." "So why do you think that he let you go?" "We don't know." "We don't know." "I think my mother spoke this perfect German and she didn't beg, she didn't crawl, she just got up there and spoke, she just got up there and spoke, asked to speak to him in a proper manner." "And I think he took it on board and then uncalled my number." "Well, I was transferred to the main camp." "We were on this list to be evacuated and my mother looked around and she says," ""oh, my goodness." "We are all with these functionary prisoners," "I wonder if they'll kill us."" "And we were put into a cattle truck." "And my mother made a speech." ""Just remember, we are leaving here." ""We are all equal from now on." ""We are all equal from now on." ""We no longer have your functions." ""And remember, we may need one another's help." ""So from now on, you're all going to be friends."" "And that's what happened." "After leaving Auschwitz-birkenau in November 1944, kitty and her mother went through further six camps and several death marches before finally being liberated in salzwedel, Germany." "April 14th, 1945." "April 14th, 1945." "Liberation was at best bittersweet." "It meant that for the first time, they had to confront loss, loss of parents, loss of spouses, loss of children, loss of entire communities, loss of entire worlds." "And for years they had guarded themselves from feeling anything from feeling anything and once they felt, the feeling of vacuum of emptiness sometimes shattered them." "We had tried not be emotional about anything." "If you did, your emotions would just take over and you couldn't go on." "That a civilized nation would take people on a train, bring them to gassing, annihilate them, confiscate and recycle the elements of their body confiscate and recycle the elements of their body and do that systematically, day in and day out." "It's inconceivable." "How could this happen?" "I felt very ashamed at the world and very--just upset that this could ever take place." "Some people see it as just a time in history." "But they don't understand how it relates to us today." "We are the ultimate proof of her survival." "Of her survival." "If she hadn't found the hope to keep on going," "I wouldn't be sitting here." "Now, what I want to show you is what's this water." "It's incredibly important to tell you about this water." "Women, men, children, old, that's a final resting place." "That's a cemetery." "Kitty hart-moxon is saying "I was here." ""This is what they did to me." ""This is how it was set up." "But I prevailed."" "There are people that simply don't believe that this place existed." "We know it happened to the Jews but the Jews weren't the first then they weren't the last." "So who's going to be next?"