The journey
The journey, which during the war took six months, covered a distance of about 1000 miles from Auschwitz in southern Poland via a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen concentration camp near Wroclaw. From there Kitty walked in the snow for seven to ten days across the Owl mountains between Poland and Czechoslovakia and six days in an open coal truck across southern Germany. She spent a month as a slave-labourer working in an underground factory for Philips in Porta Westfalica near Hanover, and then a final train journey to Salzwedel in the former East Germany, where Kitty and the remnants of her death march were left to die in a sealed container truck.
Recollections
Kitty had already spent nearly two years in Auschwitz, and it was from here that the journey began with a group of 100 women, including her mother, selected by a nameless German industrialist to work at a Telefunken radio factory in Poland. As she says at the conclusion of the 1000 mile journey. "I had a good apprenticeship in Auschwitz and our Auschwitz group survived all the way to Porta. They all survived the death march, they all survived the train journey, the 100, intact, whereas thousands, I'm not going to say hundreds, thousands actually died." Her Auschwitz group was eventually split up in April, when 50 of them disappeared for ever.
Revelations
At the time, the reason for this long journey across Poland and Germany seemed senseless. Now the reason is known, and the programme reveals the existence of a secret telex from Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, to his friend Karl Hanke, governor of Silesia in Poland. Speer asks for Hanke's support in moving the Telefunken workforce from Poland to Porta Westfalica because of their "unique skills in the production of jamming transmitters and equipment for high-performance aircraft". The orders were given and the women moved. Nobody gave any thought as to how inhumane the transfer could be. Hundreds died on the way.
The programme also reveals in part the extent of German underground war production. Kitty visits the "Giant" complex in the Polish mountains, eight vast underground factories intended to be connected by rail and where the Nazis planned to make V-2 rockets and by some accounts were already experimenting with advanced secret weapons.
In Porta Westfalica, Kitty worked in such an underground factory making radio valves for Philips, whose entire production had been moved from Holland to Germany. The tunnels are closed now and local historians tell her that some secrets of what was going on there are still too sensitive to be revealed, not least by the internationally known companies who made cynical use of her and others' slave labour.
