When Magda Hellinger was 87, she sat down and wrote a slim book about surviving for three years at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Her beloved husband, Bela, who had also endured three years in the camp, had died at 92 the previous year and Hellinger put pen to paper to provide lasting evidence of what the Nazis had done.
“She always wanted to tell her story but when we were children we weren’t really listening,” Lee says. As a child at top left, Maya Lee and her late mother Magda Hellinger’s kindergarten class in Israel, 1951. From “The Nazis Knew My Name.”Maya Lee is the co-author, with her late mother Magda Hellinger, of “The Nazis Knew My Name.” Maya Lee is the co-author, with her late mother Magda Hellinger, of “The Nazis Knew My Name.” Maya Lee is the co-author, with her late mother Magda Hellinger , of “The Nazis Knew My Name.
After the war, many people who held positions of power in the camp were accused of being collaborators. Lee’s research found that Hellinger herself had faced several hearings, but that each time there was testimony demonstrating that not only was Hellinger not a collaborator, but she had also risked her own life countless times to improve or save the lives of thousands of women.