Stella Müller-Madej

Stella Müller-Madej (born February 5, 1930 in Krakow ; † January 29, 2013 ) was a Jewish contemporary witness of the Shoah . She has published a book about her rescue with Schindler's List .

Life

Stella Müller was born as the daughter of Zygmunt Müller (1902–1982) and Berta Bleiweis (1905–1985) into a wealthy Jewish family in Krakow. She was nine years old when the war broke out. In 1941 she and her family were locked up in the ghetto and deported from there to the Plaszow camp in 1942.

In October 1944, at the age of 14, Stella was deported to Auschwitz ("prisoner no. 76 372"). Thanks to the efforts of her uncle Zygmunt Grünberg (1896–1945), she and her family were added to Schindler's list of essential war workers and sent together with other prisoners to his German enamel factory (DEF) in the Bohemian town of Brünnlitz , where she worked as a lathe operator. It was listed as:

[List:] 1 [Line:] 169 [Religion:] Ju. [Nationality:] Po. [Inmate number:] 76372 MULLER Stella 5.2.28 Metal worker

In Brünnlitz it was liberated by Soviet troops on May 8, 1945. Long after her liberation, Stella had great problems finding her way back to a “normal life”, and she also had to struggle with health problems, especially those of the spine, which can be traced back to abuse; Several bones had been broken in the camp, and a total of five operations were necessary to restore her to some extent.

She married a second time in 1954 and 1968. She spent a few years in the United States , but later decided to return to Poland to be with her parents.

She told her experiences in a book that appeared in 1994 and has been translated into nine languages. Her autobiography is one of the few authentic testimonies about Schindler and the only autobiographical work by a Jew saved by him.

Stella Müller-Madej last lived and worked in Podhale , where she and her husband ran a small hotel.

Quote

“We were amazed at every single hour we survived, because we all knew that we were sentenced to death, be it by gassing or by shooting. We just had no right to live. "

"I owe my biological life to my parents, the second life was given to me by Oskar Schindler."

publication

• Stella Müller-Madej, The Girl from the Schindler List , Augsburg 1994

literature

• Andrea Löw, Markus Roth: Jews in Krakow under German occupation 1939–1945 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2011

Web links

• Picture and short biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated August 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.