About

In March 1942, 25-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger was deported from Slovakia to Auschwitz with nearly 1,000 other young Jewish women, told they were going to work in a shoe factory. Instead, she was thrust into the brutal reality of the camp.

Selected by the SS for leadership roles within the prisoner system, Magda served over three years as a room leader, block leader, and eventually camp leader responsible for tens of thousands of women. Constantly balancing survival with resistance, she used intelligence, courage, and careful negotiation to save lives while avoiding deadly suspicion.

Based on Magda’s own testimony and her daughter Maya’s extensive research, this remarkable story reveals extraordinary strength, compassion, and humanity in the darkest of circumstances.

Maya Lee is the daughter of Magda Hellinger. She is an accomplished businesswoman and fundraiser with several nonprofit organisations. After coauthoring an autobiography of her Holocaust-survivor husband, she encouraged her mother to document her own story. Maya subsequently conducted wide-ranging research to fill out her mother’s story. The Nazis Knew My Name is the result.

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