The Nazis Knew My Name

October 1, 2021
A Holocaust survivor's daughter chronicles how her mother used her influence as a prisoner functionary to save lives at Auschwitz. In 2003, Lee's mother, Hellinger, printed and sold copies of a memoir that detailed her experiences as a concentration camp survivor. But it was only after she died that Lee fully appreciated the "complexity of my mother's story," which Lee amplified through academic research and by drawing on the extensive recorded testimonies that Hellinger--and those who knew her--left behind. Retaining her mother's first-person perspective throughout, Lee traces Hellinger's life from her childhood in eastern Czechoslovakia and reveals that her mother showed an early gift for organizing Jewish community projects. She studied to become a teacher and then opened a kindergarten that Nazis allowed her to continue operating after Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938. In 1942, she was deported to Auschwitz with other Jewish women from her town. Using her organizational skills, Hellinger helped keep order among her fellow inmates and quickly earned the respect of female Nazi guards. Her German captors began to give her small but important prison jobs and then promoted her to prison leadership roles, which put her in direct contact with high-ranking Nazi officials. Lee shows how her mother deftly negotiated her difficult position to keep both herself and many of her fellow inmates alive. When Nazi officials chose sick prisoners to die, she used her influence to spare lives. When new prisoners arrived, she helped them learn "the ways of the camp so they would have the best chance of survival." Written in part to clarify Hellinger's true relationship to her captors, this book offers a much-needed perspective on the roles many so-called collaborators played in helping fellow concentration camp inmates survive the Holocaust. "Magda has been misrepresented and judged unfairly by some survivors simply because of the positions she was forced to hold," writes Lee, who provides a solid corrective. A poignantly illuminating Holocaust memoir.

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October 15, 2021
At the age of 25, kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger was ripped from her family and shipped off with a thousand other Jewish women to Auschwitz. As a technique to create tension among captives and pivot attention from themselves, the SS put prisoners in charge of the camp's accommodation blocks. In this harrowing personal narrative, Magda's experience as a block leader is shared in heartbreaking detail. Through her leadership, Magda showed immense integrity in the face of insurmountable immorality. She used her position of power to rescue prisoners headed to the gas chambers by misdirecting them back to their blocks. She protected those in her charge through small acts of kindness, watching out for the weakest in her ranks. While watching over the notorious Block 10, whose women were subjected to gruesome medical experiments, Magda distracted fellow prisoners from their pain and boosted morale by organizing a cabaret. Magda's calm leadership and tenacious spirit touched the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, interred at Auschwitz. Magda's own words, completed by her daughter's copious research, create an unputdownable account of resilience and the power of compassion.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 1, 2022

In March 1942, 25-year-old kindergarten teacher Hellinger arrived in Auschwitz on the second transport from Slovakia, among nearly 1,000 women and some of the camp's first Jewish prisoners. She was one of the few to survive. Daughter Lee drew on her mother's personal account, augmented by research, to provide this chronicle of Hellinger's time in the camp. There, she was placed in charge of hundreds of women in the notorious Experimental Block 10 and sought to save lives while having to deal regularly with the SS guards and avoid their suspicions--and summary execution. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

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