Polish jew Kitty Hart Moxon had to use the same bowl for eating soup and as a toilet, and never was able to wash it between uses. Her job at Auschwitz was to dig out the excrement from the toilets with her bare hands, which was a "prestigious position."
She personally believes "much more than 1.5 million" jews were exterminated at Birkenau.
A chilling history lesson comes to life for Berwickshire pupils visiting Auschwitz
Berwickshire News
08 October 2009
By Kevin Janiak
HIGH SCHOOL pupils from across the region were due to fly out to Poland yesterday as part of a nationwide project run by the Holocaust Education Trust - including Anna Merryfield and Catherine Swan from Berwickshire High School, and Maddy King and Hannah Simmons from Eyemouth High School.
Last Thursday, at an orientation seminar, the group heard from Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart Moxon. Kevin Janiak reports.
I had expected to be shocked.
That is a bit of a contradiction, I guess, but Kitty Hart Moxon is a bundle of contradictions. She looks like your favourite gran. She is pleasant, quietly spoken and erudite, yet what she went through between the ages of 12 and 19 would test the very soul of the most battle-hardened soldier.
Her memories of these terrible years remain sharp, although she herself admits that the sheer scale of the atrocities she witnessed meant that she was numbed to the horror.
She was born Kitty Felix in the small town of Bielsko, in Southern Poland. She was 12 when the Germans invaded in 1939. They were so close to the border, as it was then, that many families, including Kitty's, decided to flee to Lublin in central Poland.
But within weeks, the German troops entered the city.
The Felix family had to register as Jews to obtain ration cards and they were posted into the Lublin ghetto. Children were not allowed any schooling and parents were not allowed to work. They were not allowed to walk on the pavements, but in the gutter. Once, Kitty said, she was walking down the pavement with a boy she was friendly with. She stepped off, but he did not and he was shot and killed in front of her.
But it was here where she learned the survival skills which would ultimately see her through the hell that was the Nazi death camp.
She and her mother bartered for forged certificates and they fled, only to be caught and sentenced to life in Auschwitz.
There, they were stripped naked, their heads shaved, and that was only the start of the dehumanisation. They were treated worse than cattle. Kitty had to survive on her wits, taking bread and clothes from those who died of the cold or from one of the many diseases that were understandably rife in a place where there were very few toilets for thousands of prisoners and no washing facilities.
Kitty recalled how she had to tie a bowl to her belly at all times. This was her lifeline. It was a container for soup as well as a toilet. There was no way to wash out the bowl between the different uses.
She was able to barter her way into several jobs within the camp. She said that the job of scheisse kommander was a very prestigious position. They got to dig out the excrement from the toilets with their bare hands, but it meant working inside, away from the bitter cold outdoors.
She also gained a job in the storage barracks – named Kanada because the name symbolised a place of great riches – where the belongings of new arrivals were stored.
But the barracks also contained the by-products of the people who were being killed in the gas chambers and crematoriums, such as dental gold and human hair (used as fleece linings in military jackets).
Kitty stated that although the conservative estimate of numbers killed by the Nazis at Birkenau is a million and a half, she believes it is much more.
She said: "When you think of 9/11, 3,000 people died in New York.
"In the eight months I was in this Kanada, between 10 and 20,000 people died every day.
"How do we know? Easy. We saw how many trains came in. We knew how many people were in each cattle truck.
"I know the modest statistic is a million and a half. But we know it is much more than that. We cannot prove it, because all of these people were turned into ash."
Kitty's is a remarkable story, and one which I could not hope to do justice in a newspaper feature.
What one has to remember, however, is that no matter how horrific her experiences, how difficult it is to understand how she made life-and-death decisions on a daily basis and was able to walk out two years later, this is still one story of one individual.
When we get to Auschwitz, we will hear, and struggle to comprehend, the stories of hundreds of thousands, even millions of individuals. Most of them did not have Kitty's determination to live every morning she woke. Most of them waited patiently for their turn to enter the gas chambers, not knowing, yet at the same time knowing, what lay ahead.
Anna, Catherine, Maddy and Hannah will be handed the job of trying to explain to their fellow pupils their experiences of their day-long visit.
See next week's Berwickshire News to see how the group fared. Also, go to www.berwickshirenews.co.uk today to see a video of Kitty answering questions from the group.
By her count, around 3.6 million were exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau in just the 8 months she was there (8 months x 15,000/day). Considering Auschwitz was operated as a "death factory" for some 4 years, at this rate around 22 million jews were gassed with bug spray and turned to ash, soap, lampshades, and Nazi military jacket lining.
Moxon's book, Return to Auschwitz:
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