Magda Hellinger was a Jewish woman who during World War II, as a prisoner in a leadership role in Auschwitz-Birkenau, saved dozens of women from certain death. [1]
Hellinger was born in eastern Czechoslovakia, to a father who taught Jewish history and German, and imparted his skills in German on his daughter, which she would put to use in Auschwitz. Interested in Zionism from an early age, she joined a Zionist youth organization, and worked as a kindergarten teacher. [1]
Hellinger died in 2006, at age 89, a few years after she had self-published her memoir, and had given testimony. which was taped, on a few occasions. After her death, her daughter Maya Lee (with the help of a co-writer, David Brewster) added to that memoir after doing more research. She published The Nazis Knew My Name in 2022. [1]
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
Annelies Marie Frank was a German-Dutch diarist of Jewish heritage. One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. It is one of the world's best-known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.
There is a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Holocaust in popular culture.
Jane Mathison Haining was a Scottish missionary for the Church of Scotland in Budapest, Hungary, who was recognized in 1997 by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for having risked her life to help Jews during the Holocaust.
Elisabeth Langgässer was a German author and teacher. She is known for lyrical poetry and novels. Her short story Saisonbeginn, for example, provides a graphically human portrayal of a 1930s German Alpine village erecting a sign forbidding the entry of Jews.
Irène Némirovsky was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kyiv, Ukraine under the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France, and wrote in French, but was denied French citizenship. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is a German-British cellist, and a surviving member of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz.
Mária Földes was a Hungarian-Romanian playwright. After surviving several Nazi concentration camps during 1944-1945 in World War II, including Auschwitz, she returned to Romania, where she studied drama and theater arts. Writing several plays in Hungarian, she is also known for her memoir, The Stroll (1974), published in Hungarian and in Hebrew (1975). It was adapted as a one-woman play by the same name, and received productions in Yiddish and English during the late 1970s, including in the United States.
Rena Kornreich Gelissen, born Rena Kornreich, was a Polish-born Jew, known for her memoir, Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, her story of surviving the Nazi concentration camps with her sister Danka.
Denis Avey was a British veteran of the Second World War who was held as a prisoner of war at E715, a subcamp of Auschwitz. While there he saved the life of a Jewish prisoner, Ernst Lobethal, by smuggling cigarettes to him. For that he was made a British Hero of the Holocaust in 2010.
Orli Wald was a member of the German Resistance in Nazi Germany. She was arrested in 1936 and charged with high treason, whereupon she served four and a half years in a women's prison, followed by "protective custody" in Nazi concentration camps until 1945, when she escaped.
Laura Hillman was a German-born American survivor of Holocaust concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. She is also a Schindlerjude, who survived the Holocaust with the help of Oskar Schindler. She was also a writer and memoirist, as well as a lecturer on the Holocaust, and a docent at the Long Beach Museum of Art. In 2005, she published a young adult book about her experiences during the Holocaust which is titled i will plant you a lilac tree – a memoir of a Schindler's list survivor.
Miriam Chaszczewacki or Miriam Chaszczewacka (1924–1942) was a 15-year-old Jewish girl and Holocaust victim who in 1939 began writing a personal diary about her life in the Radomsko ghetto which ended a few days before her death in 1942.
Eva Brewster was a German-born Canadian writer.
Henriëtte Henriquez Pimentel was a Dutch teacher and trained nurse who during the Second World War headed a crèche in Amsterdam which cared for small children while their parents were otherwise occupied. Together with Walter Süskind and Johan van Hulst, from around October 1942 she helped to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish infants by smuggling them into the homes of sympathetic host families. After being arrested by the Nazis in April 1943, she was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp the following September.
Rena Margulies Chernoff is a writer and Holocaust survivor from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland. She's one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was born on July 6, 1933 and named after her father's mother, Rivka. She wrote The Tailors of Tomaszow: A Memoir of Polish Jews, originally published in 2014, with her son Allan Chernoff.
Edith Eva "Edie" Eger is a psychologist practicing in the United States. Born to Hungarian Jewish parents, she is a Holocaust survivor and a specialist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her memoirs entitled The Choice - Embrace the Possible, published in 2017, became an international bestseller. Her second book, titled The Gift - 12 Lessons to Save Your Life was published in September 2020.
Lily Ebert is a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, living in London.
Ella Lingens-Reiner, M.D. was an Austrian physician and is one of the Righteous Among Nations honored by Yad Vashem. She and her husband Kurt Lingens M.D., with Baron Karl von Motesiczky, harbored multiple Jews in their home during the Second World War. She was sent to Auschwitz by the Gestapo in 1942 and then later was imprisoned at Dachau. She survived the war and became president of the organization of former Auschwitz prisoners, Österreichische Lagergemeinschaft Auschwitz.