Sometimes it can feel like the horrors of the Holocaust happened hundreds of years ago, but the fact of the matter is that there are still survivors of the atrocity alive today.
One survivor, Kitty Hart-Moxon, is a 96-year-old woman who presently lives in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England. She was recently asked to choose one thing that could symbolize what her experience was like, and she knew exactly what it would be: the tattooed number she had cut out of her own skin.
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Kitty explained the entire experience to The Guardian. Following the war, she was working as a nurse in Britain, and people kept commenting on the tattoo that was forced on her by the Nazis. She said that a doctor commented that the number must be her boyfriend's phone number, tattooed on her because she couldn't remember it. She decided enough was enough.
"And, that just did something to me. I decided then and there it’s got to come off."
So she did, deciding to keep the number in a jar.
"I thought it is better to remove it, and put it in a specimen jar. It will be there forever, whereas I will be gone."
Kitty went on to ask that her mother's number be cut out of her skin, too. Now Kitty is participating in a new virtual exhibit by the Imperial War Museums (IWM), where she appears in video holding the jar that contains her numbered skin.
Kitty points out that it's unlikely other people have their numbers the way she does.
"It was the story of my life, wasn’t it?" she said. "And I don’t think anybody else has got theirs because most people died with them. But I thought it will now be there for ever. It’s part of history. It’s important."
Kitty and her mother made it through the Lublin ghetto in occupied Poland as well as through Auschwitz. The pair were forced to endure grueling death marches, and Kitty spent her entire teenagehood enduring the horrors of the Holocaust. She lost her father and brother to the Nazis.
The exhibition's photographer, Simon Roberts, was especially moved by Kitty's contribution. He explains, "I asked each of them if they would provide something that was of significance to them. So I didn’t know anything about it until she presented it."
He continued, "Initially I wasn’t really quite sure what exactly I was looking at. When there was that sudden realisation that this was actually something removed from her own body, it was quite shocking. But, of course, it was a shocking act to be numbered in that way, and so I think it is a very powerful emblem of what humans can do to other humans."
Most importantly, the contribution means a lot to Kitty, and it means a lot to the world.
"For her, it is an important reminder and, I suppose, she sees it as is something that will live beyond her, which is the importance of part of that story," Simon said. "And, obviously, it has an intensity she wants to convey about what she experienced. For her this was one of the most powerful ways to convey the graphic nature of what she and her mother experienced."
