Growing up, Kitty was extremely sporty, and participated in gymnastics, athletics, swimming, and skiing. Kitty also began learning basic English in nursery, where her mother-who was teaching at the nursery at the time-taught the children English nursery rhymes. The majority of Austro-Hungarians were German speakers, and due to the fact Bielsko belonged to Austria-Hungary, many of its residents were German speakers, including Kitty's parents, and as a result of this, the Felix family spoke German at home, with Kitty not learning a word of Polish until she began attending school. Prior to the end of the First World War, Poland had been par*ioned into three parts, with each part belonging to either Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, or the Russian Empire the town of Bielsko belonged to Austria-Hungary. Lola's sister had studied medicine in Vienna, and Lola herself went to England in 1911 to study English at Bedford College, London-eventually becoming an English teacher in Poland, where she taught children preparing for their state examinations (this meant it was an advanced level of English learning).
Her mother was born on 18 February 1890, to a Slovakian father and his wife. Kitty's paternal family had come from Italy hundreds of years ago-it had been said that one of her ancestors had been called to attend to the King of Poland, as he was a doctor, and that is how the family came to reside in Poland. Lola's father was also in the agricultural business: he was a farmer, who owned his own land, and Kitty believes that this may have been how her parents met-with Lola's father potentially using Karol as a supplier. Upon his father's death, he took over his agricultural supply business, which he ran with his sister, until the outbreak of the war. 1888) had studied law in Vienna, and had also been a captain in the Austrian army in the First World War. She was the second child of Karol Felix and his wife Lola Rosa Felix, who had a son five years Kitty's senior, named Robert. Kitty Hart-Moxon was born Kitty Felix, on 1 December 1926, in the southern Polish town of Bielsko (known as Bielitz in German), which bordered both Germany and Czechoslovakia. She has written two autobiographies en*led I am Alive (1961) and Return to Auschwitz (1981). Shortly after her liberation in April 1945 by American soldiers, she moved to England with her mother, where she married and dedicated her life to raising awareness of the Holocaust. She was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1943 at age 16, where she survived for two years, and was also imprisoned at other camps. Kitty Hart-Moxon, OBE (born 1 December 1926) is a Polish-English Holocaust survivor.