Stella Müller-Madej (1930–2013)

Stella Müller-Madej was born to an affluent Jewish family in Kraków, Poland. Her parents were Berta and Zygmunt Müller. Stella was nine years old when Nazi Germany invaded her country in World War II. Nothing in their experience prepared the Müller family for the dehumanizing ghetto into which they were confined in 1941. In 1942, they were sent to the Płaszów concentration camp, where they survived as members of Oskar Schindler's "list" of necessary war workers. Stella was put to exhausting labor in a brush factory. In 1944, 300 of the Jews on Schindler's list, including 14-year-old Stella, were transported to the death camp at Auschwitz. There she fell seriously ill; but she was saved from death by Schindler's insistence on the return of "his" workers. She and her family were sent to Schindler's enamelware factory at Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia, and liberated by the Red Army nine months later in May 1945. At age 17, Stella went back to school and eventually managed to pass her final exams. She had many health problems, especially with her spine, caused by wartime injuries and abuse, and needed five operations to repair them to some extent. She married in 1954 and again in 1968. She spent a few years in the USA but later decided to return to Poland to be closer to her parents. Her memoir, translated into English as A Girl from Schindler’s List, published in the USA in 1994, is one of the few authentic eyewitness accounts of Schindler.