Shortly after her liberation, she moved to England with her mother, where she married and dedicated her life to raising awareness of the Holocaust.
Hart-Moxon was born Kitty Felix, on 1 December 1926,[1] in the southern Polish town of Bielsko (known as Bielitz in German), which bordered both Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Karol Felix (born c. 1888) had studied law in Vienna, and had also been a captain in the Austrian army in the First World War.
The family led quite a prosperous lifestyle: they travelled a lot; employed domestic staff; lived in comfortable accommodation; could afford to send Kitty to private school; and had lavish birthday celebrations—even including parties on ice.
Kitty has stated that growing up, she was completely oblivious to the political situation in both Poland, and wider Europe, including Hitler's rise to power.
One thing she does recall from her youth however, is a girl joining her school who stated that she and her family had been expelled from Germany for being Jews.
In late August 1939, while on holiday in the mountains with her mother, Kitty went canoeing, and ended up disappearing down the river.
Arriving home to find that Karol had packed up all their possessions, her father sent Kitty and her mother to board the train to Lublin straight away (she had not known at the time, but already the Germans had placed machine guns on the rooftops of the town, and had been shooting at citizens).
Two days later (still prior to the Nazis' invasion of Poland on 1 September), Karol and Robert joined them in Lublin; the two had managed to board one of the last trains out of the town, with the remaining citizens being forced to flee by foot—it later transpired that many of these people were eventually gunned down in their attempts to escape, when the invading forces caught up with them.
[3] With these passports, birth, and identity cards, the two were smuggled onto a train of Polish forced labourers bound for Germany.
The family members were interrogated and charged at trial three days later with "endangering the security of Third Reich" and "illegally [entering] Germany with forged papers.
Throughout their imprisonment, Kitty maintained a variety of jobs, including that of night shift worker responsible for sorting through the confiscated possessions of prisoners arriving by train.
These prisoners were chosen to be moved, rather than executed, because Albert Speer, the German armaments minister, believed the special skills these prisoners had gained at the Phillips factory would be useful in other German factories for the manufacture of "jamming transmitters and equipment for high-performance aircraft".
After a time in Porta Westfalica, Kitty and her mother were sent to Bergen-Belsen, at which point they were abandoned in a locked train car and left to die.
While in England, Kitty Hart-Moxon became interested in educating people about the Holocaust by telling her life story to the public.
Then, in 1978, Yorkshire Television (YTV) producer Peter Morley's team learned about Hart-Moxon while doing background research on a project about women who risked their lives to save others during the Nazi era, and convinced him to meet her.
[6] She didn't fit the parameters they'd set for Women of Courage, but after two visits, Morley was so impressed with Hart-Moxon, he submitted a proposal to YTV to accompany her to Auschwitz for her first visit in 33 years and film it, provided she brought along her eldest son, then a young doctor, for emotional support.
I felt this to be a unique opportunity to add fresh insight to the infamy of Auschwitz as had been portrayed in both fictional and non-fictional films and television programmes.
In the 2003 Queen's Birthday Honours, Hart-Moxon was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services relating to Holocaust education.