Kitty was born in Bielsko close to the Polish-German-Czech frontiers in 1926.
Following the German invasion of Poland, Kitty’s father decided to flee eastwards to the city of Lublin. However, within weeks the German army occupied the city and quickly established the Lublin ghetto. Kitty and her family were to spend 2 years on and off in the ghetto.
Kitty’s father realised it was essential to escape from the ghetto before it was sealed off and with the help of a priest they obtained non-Jewish documents. Posing as Polish forced labourers Kitty and her mother, who had to separate from the rest of the family, were transported into Germany. They were working in the IG Farben industrial concern in Bitterfeld when in early 1943 they were betrayed, imprisoned and sentenced to death, but their sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in Auschwitz -Birkenau. They arrived in Auschwitz on 2 April 1943.
In her second year in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kitty was forced to work for 8 months in the “Kanada Kommando”, a work group that had to sort belongings of victims who were brought into Auschwitz. The Kanada complex where Kitty worked was situated very close to the 4 gas chambers and crematoria. This close proximity meant that Kitty was a witness to the relentless killing that took place from April 1944 to November 1944. This was the period in which the greatest numbers of victims were murdered.
On 11 November 1944 Kitty and her mother were evacuated to a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen, near Wroclaw to work in an electronics factory. This camp was evacuated on 18 February 1945 and prisoners were forced on a Death March which took them over the Sudeten mountain range into Czechoslovakia. Thousands of women had died during the 2 week death march, exposed to freezing temperatures, deep snow and without food or shelter. In Czechoslovakia they were forced into open coal trucks. The train took 8 days to reach the next destination, Porta Westfalica, in northwest Germany. There, Kitty and her mother had to work in an underground Philips factory.
In spring 1945 Kitty and her mother were sent to Bergen-Belsen, but then marched back to a siding and pushed into a cattle truck and the doors sealed. The train moved eastwards and eventually stopped outside the town of Salzwedel where it was abandoned and the people inside left to die. Hours later one truck where Kitty was with her mother was opened but many women had suffocated because of lack of air. The few alive were taken to a nearby camp outside the town. The camp was liberated by American Forces on 14 April 1945.
Kitty and her mother were the only survivors of their family. Kitty’s father had been murdered; her brother killed in action at Stalingrad and 30 members of her family perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1946 Kitty and her mother received permits to settle in the UK, where their only remaining relatives had been living. They found this a hard period of readjustment; it was felt that nobody would listen and help them to deal with their past. From the time of liberation Kitty felt it was her duty, having witnessed and experienced the horrors of war, to speak out about her past and warn of the consequences of intolerance, racism and hatred.
For many years Kitty has been speaking in schools, universities, colleges and to the general public, in the UK and abroad, as well as on radio and television. She has written two books: “I am alive” and “Return to Auschwitz” and made the films “Return To Auschwitz”, where a camera crew accompanied her on her first return to the camp, a film of the Death March documenting the last 6 months of the war and “Another Journey By Train”, where she met 4 Neo-Nazis at Birkenau.
