The winter of 1944-45 was so cold that rivers froze. Yet in these last six months of World War II, orders came to evacuate concentration camps, slave labour camps and POW camps in the path of the allied advance. Thousands of starving and ill-clad men and women, most of them Jews, were force-marched over the roads and countryside of the collapsing Third Reich, most without any real destination.
Only the strongest survived. Stragglers were shot, those that fell down exhausted were clubbed to death or left to die.
Among them was Kitty Felix, barely 17, but already a veteran of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where she had been for nearly two years. In 1945 she began a "death march" with hundreds of other women, including her 55-year-old mother. Now married and living in Birmingham as Kitty Hart-Moxon, aged 75, 57 years on, she's gone back to the scene of this horror. Read her recollections.
In Death March: A Survivor's Story, she retraces the route of that journey from Poland to Germany.
Kitty's travelling companion is Stephen Smith, the Director of Beth Shalom in Nottinghamshire, Britain's first Holocaust Memorial Centre. Stephen Smith probes Kitty's memory of these events of 1945, and finds that while a landscape might have changed beyond all recognition, details are etched in Kitty's memory.
She says: "57 years can go by, but your memory will not fade, certain events, if they are extraordinary, you never forget them. They're etched in your brain and they stay with you for the rest of your days."
