Kitty Hart

Kitty Hart, née Felix, was born to a prosperous, middle-class Jewish family in the southern Polish town of Bielsko. In August 1939, to escape proximity to Nazi Germany, the family moved to Lublin. When Germany invaded Poland at the start of World War II the following month, they were confined to the Lublin Ghetto. During the winter of 1940-41, they attempted to escape to Russia but were refused at the border and returned to Lublin. They obtained false identity papers to pose as Polish Catholics and split up to increase their chance of survival. Her father and brother were killed. Kitty went with her mother to volunteer for work in Germany, but they were betrayed in 1943 and sent to the death camp at Auschwitz. In 1944, the two were taken along with several hundred prisoners to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and then on a death march across the Sudeten mountains. They were eventually put on a train and shipped across Europe to Porta Westfalica in Germany to work in an underground factory. Then they were sent to Bergen-Belsen and later to a camp near Salzwedel. They survived to be liberated by the American army in 1945. Kitty and her mother worked as translators for the British Army and then emigrated to the UK. In 1949, she married Rudi Hart, an upholsterer with whom she had two sons. Her first book, the memoir I Am Alive, was published in 1961, and led to her being featured in a documentary, Kitty: Return to Auschwitz. The documentary in turn inspired her second volume of autobiography, Return to Auschwitz (1981). She later worked with the BBC to make another documentary, Death March: A Survivor's Story (2003). She trained as a nurse and worked at a nursing home and a private radiology firm.