Survivor spent life teaching of Holocaust
Lili Stern-pohlmann, who has died in London aged 91, was a Holocaust survivor rescued by a German civil servant during the Second World War and later brought to Britain, where she devoted her life to educating people about the death camps.
In the summer of 1939, war was imminent, and her family, the Sterns, cut their holiday short and returned home to Krakow.
On Aug. 31, Lili's father, Filip, put his wife Cecylia, Lili, and her little brother, Uriel, on a train to Lvov (now Lviv, Ukraine), where Lili's grandparents lived; Filip stayed behind. War broke out the next day.
German forces took the city on June 29, 1941, and by early November they had set up a ghetto where, like other Jews, the Sterns were forced to move.
In March 1942, the Germans began to deport Jews to Belzec, a complex of concentration and extermination camps. With the danger growing, Lili's father decided it was time to go into hiding.
Lili and her mother would conceal themselves in a shop, and Filip would keep young Uriel with him.
The arrangement was that Filip would pass by the shop at an agreed time so that Cecylia knew her husband and son were safe. On the second day he failed to appear; later, it emerged that he had been arrested.
Cecylia was an accomplished dress designer. When it emerged that the Germans were planning to seal off the ghetto, locking all Jews inside, she got in touch with a former customer — a German woman, Frau Wieth — urging her to take Lili and hide her. Eventually Frau Wieth agreed and sheltered Lili in her apartment; Cecylia returned to the ghetto.
Irmgard Wieth was a kind, eccentric woman attached to the Nazi occupying forces in Lvov.
On May 31 1943, Lili's mother burst in, saying: “The ghetto is burning, I escaped at the last minute.”
Frau Wieth agreed to shelter Cecylia too.
In the summer of 1944, as the Soviet army approached, the Germans began to flee. Lili and her mother secured a refuge with Andrey Sheptytsky, an archbishop, who hid them in his residence.
After the war, Lili was one of 123 Jewish children brought to Britain in the Swedish SS Ragne.
A year later, her mother Cecylia joined her, the only ones to have survived the war; her brother Uriel and father Filip had perished.
Lili devoted her life to speaking about the Holocaust. “If we, the last generation, don't talk about it, then that's it. I owe it to posterity.”