But we had to part from my Father who was later betrayed and was executed. He obtained non-Jewish identity documents for us and worked out a survival plan: mother and I were to join Polish workers who were rounded up for forced labour in Germany. We lived in the wild for weeks, and eventually made our way back to Lublin – to the vicarage of the Catholic priest, F. In 1942 deportation was imminent and we fled into the forest. We attempted five escapes and eventually we succeeded, and for some months we sheltered in Zabia Wola, a tiny Jewish rural community south of Lublin. My mother, made contact with a Catholic priest in the city, and risked her life to teach English in the church in return for food. Soon we were herded into the Ghetto which was horrendously overcrowded, living conditions were unbearable, there were round-ups, deportations, starvation and then came an epidemic of typhus and cholera. As old resentments re-surfaced, the Polish citizens also turned against the Jewish population. But, when the German armies invaded, the ethnic Germans turned against their Polish neighbours and the Jews. Bielsko had a mixed population, comprising of German, Polish, Czechs and Jewish citizens who were all well integrated into the community. In summer everyone went hiking and climbing in the nearby mountains.
I had a wonderful childhood – in winter there was skiing and ice skating. In 1939 my town Bielsko was very close to the German and Czechoslovakian frontiers. So let me start there and see where it leads us. Īt first when I saw the title of our theme this year: Communities together: Build a Bridge, I was unsure whether my own story could really help to illustrate the point – so extreme were the circumstances. Listen to Kitty Hart-Moxon’s speech at the UK Ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day 2013 below. This podcast is a recording of Holocaust survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon's speech from the UK commemoration event for Holocaust Memorial Day 2013, in which she spoke about her life story.
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