One Day in Auschwitz

Feb 1 2015 TV-PG 0h 45m
Documentary

Auschwitz-Birkenau was designed to kill. Four gas chambers murdered thousands at a time, belching out smoke and human ashes. Starvation, thirst, disease, and hard labor reduced the average lifespan to less than three months. More than 1-million people perished in the largest German Nazi concentration and extermination camp. Seventy years after her liberation, Kitty Hart-Moxon makes a final return to Auschwitz-Birkenau to walk among the crumbling memorial with students Natalia and Lydia, who, at 16, are the same age now as she was then. As Kitty tells them her story of daily existence, themes begin to emerge: the ever-present threat of death, resilience, friendship, human strength, resisting the Nazis' constant lethal intent, and living like an animal while still remaining human. Natalia and Lydia ask questions; Kitty provides answers, passing her legacy to the next generation.

Plot

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.

Written by

N/A

Directed by

Steve Purcell

Production Countries

United States of America, Poland

Production Companies

USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Discovery Channel

Languages

English

Awards

N/A

Scores
# of Votes
336
Average Rating
7.8 out of 10
Metascore
NA
Popularity
NA