One Day in Auschwitz (2015)

• 79%
• 2015
• Documentary
• Steve Purcell

One Day in Auschwitz is an hour-long documentary produced by USC Shoah Foundation. The film follows Holocaust survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon as she returns to Auschwitz-Birkenau with two high school students, Natalia Smith and Lydia Hollingsworth, to tell them her story. The girls are the same age Kitty was - 15 - when she was imprisoned in Auschwitz with her mother. When the Nazis invaded Poland, Kitty's family was quickly split up. Her older brother joined the Russian army and was killed in the Battle of Stalingrad. A priest who was a friend of her mother's got false papers for Kitty and her mother to get them out of Poland and into Germany, but someone suspected them of being Jews and gave them up to the police. The two were shipped to Auschwitz. In the film, Kitty explains the various ways she and her mother were able to survive. Kitty got herself a job manning the latrines - foul work, but it kept her from being selected for death. Later, she worked in "Canada": the warehouse where a few prisoners sorted the mountains of personal belongings that had been confiscated from everyone who passed through the gates of Auschwitz. In November, Kitty and her mother were transported out of Auschwitz to a series of other camps until they were liberated in spring 1945. By then, thirty members of their family, including Kitty's father and grandmother, had been killed.