Magda risked her own life to save hundreds of women in the Nazi death camp
Magda Hellinger not only survived Nazi tyranny and torture, but with immense courage she risked her own life to save hundreds of women inside the infamous concentration camp. This is her story.
On a cold early spring morning in March 1942, Magda Hellinger’s kindergarten was its usual hive of activity, parents dropping their children, hanging bags and removing thick, snow-dusted coats. However, on this day there was just one topic of conversation. During the night, notices had been plastered up all over their town of Michalovce, in eastern Czechoslovakia. The signs declared that all unmarried Jewish women aged 16 or over were to report to the town hall that evening. Most of the kindergarten’s staff fell into this category, as did 25year-old Magda.
Magda wasn’t too concerned. Her kindergarten was the only one in town, so she should qualify for an exemption. When she got home that night, she tried to mollify her anxious mother. If the worst happened, she would join the other girls at the Bata shoe factory, where rumour had it they would be sent. She would be home in a few months.
That afternoon, Magda was escorted to the town hall by members of the Hlinka Guard, the Slovak government militia. She did have an exemption, but her papers had been sold by a corrupt official. The next morning, she and 120 other local young women waited to board the buses that would take them away. “When my mother saw me she broke from the group and ran
to me,” writes Magda in her memoir. “Her face creased with tears, she held my head between her hands … Forcing myself to stay composed, I waved to my parents as I climbed onto the bus. It was the last time I would ever see them.”
After the bus ride then a train trip, the girls from Michalovce joined 880 other Jewish women who had been brought in from the surrounding regions. The mood of hesitant anticipation changed to anxiety and dread after they were all crowded onto a train normally used for cattle. They had no idea then, but history tells us that this group of women made up just the second of what would be hundreds of ‘transports’ of deportees over the coming years destined for the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Magda would not be spending a few months working in a shoe factory. She would be spending the next three years as a prisoner of the Nazis. For much of that time she would be a ‘prisoner functionary’ – a prisoner forced to hold responsibilities over other prisoners at the behest of the SS guards. If she was careful, clever and courageous, she might occasionally be able to save another woman’s life, while always being powerless to prevent the Nazis’ ongoing slaughter of thousands. She would tread a fine line, well aware that if at any moment she was perceived as being too kind to a fellow prisoner, she herself could be shot by an SS guard.
Hidden past
Maya Lee is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Magda Blau, née Hellinger, and Béla Blau. Her late husband, Des Lee, was also a survivor. Yet no one in the family allowed the dreadful events of World War II to dominate their lives. It really wasn’t until after Maya helped Des publish his story that she gave her mother’s war experience much thought. “Mum was always forward looking,” says Maya. “She never dwelled on the past.
Occasionally she would tell me and my sister stories about Auschwitz, but they were always matter of fact. And to be honest we never showed much interest.” Maya had no inkling that there was anything out of the ordinary about what her mother went through.
Over the years, Magda recorded testimonies of her experiences with a number of organisations. At some point, without telling anyone, she started writing her story by hand until in 2003, at the age of 87, she had her words transcribed and compiled into a thin book. “Finally I had the chance to read about Mum’s experience,” says Maya. “However, from that point on she put the Holocaust completely behind her.” Magda never spoke of the Holocaust again.
Like so many of us, Maya had gone through life unaware of many of the details of her mother’s early life.
She didn’t know the story of how a three-year-old Magda had innocently charmed a uniformed Czech official during a door-to-door search for Jewish communists in 1919, her action defusing the situation and likely saving a number of lives. Maya didn’t know that Magda, the only girl amongst five siblings, had from a young age become an active fundraiser for Zionist causes. While only 17, Magda and her best friend set up a school holiday program for Michalovce’s youngest children, a precursor to opening her own kindergarten a few years later.
“My mother had no shortage of chutzpah,” says Maya. “She was quite comfortable organising people much older and more prominent than herself. She was a natural leader from an early age. But she never wanted to be seen as a leader. She was driven to get things done that improved people’s lives, but she never wanted the spotlight.” Magda was assertive and pragmatic – traits that she would combine with courage and daring into concentration camp life.
Living hell
In the hellish environment of the camps, most new arrivals understandably shrank into themselves. Magda was one of few who were able to separate from their immediate circumstances and take a longer-term view. Even in the freezing, packed cattle train, with neither food nor water for two days, Magda repeatedly appealed to the other girls, “If we keep together and help each other, it won’t be so bad.” This was a mantra she would repeat over and over in the coming years.
On the first night at Auschwitz, the women were left with only the clothes they had on. Amid “shock, disbelief, incomprehension and fear … fear above all else”, kettles of putrid soup were brought in. Magda understood that dehydration was now their biggest threat. She volunteered to take the first sip when the Germans told them the soup was poisoned. “Why go to all the trouble of bringing us here to poison us on the first day?” she argued.
Magda continued to encourage the women the next morning as they were ‘processed’. Each girl was stripped of her clothes, crudely shaved all over, given a cold ‘sanitisation’ bath and provided with a dirty uniform that had previously belonged to a Russian prisoner of war. Unlike at other camps, it was decided that Auschwitz prisoners needed to be permanently marked with their serial number. “A tattoo that would permanently brand us as Auschwitz inmates,” Magda writes. “And so, with a few scrapes of a needle into the skin on the outside of my left forearm, I became prisoner 2318 for life.”
Saving lives
Over the coming months and years, Magda would find herself in prisoner functionary roles of increasing levels of responsibility. She was once told by a guard that the SS’s intention in using Jewish prisoners as ‘leaders’ was that it “would create division within
the Jewish prisoner population and these leaders would be blamed for camp cruelty, instead of the SS”. To some extent this would prove true, but it was not Magda’s concern at the time. She wasn’t going to let the Nazis have things all their own way if she could help it.
It was never going to be possible to save every life at Auschwitz. By the time the Nazis had their death factory operating at full pace in mid-1944, thousands of people were being killed every day, most straight off the trains they were transported in. Hundreds and hundreds died regularly of malnutrition, exhaustion or disease, and scores of others were murdered by SS guards simply for failing to obey instructions. The strategy of Magda and other ‘seasoned’ functionaries was to save a life wherever they could. “I couldn’t save everyone but I could save a few, at least for another day.”
A common situation was an outbreak of disease. Typhus, malaria and scarlet fever were never far away, and the Nazis’ approach to mitigating them was simple: whenever one of these diseases was detected inside an accommodation block, the entire block, or even the whole camp, would be sent to the gas chambers. Magda and her assistants developed a system whereby a messenger would alert them as soon as someone became sick. Magda would have that person checked by a doctor – a number of prisoners were qualified doctors – and isolated to avoid an epidemic.
Then there were the games the SS guards played during roll calls. On one occasion a guard asked a group of French girls through an interpreter (also a prisoner) which of them could no longer endure the roll call, which
– Magda Hellinger
involved standing for hours in the weather. Magda knew this was a trick. These ‘volunteers’ would be sent to the gas chambers. “As Marie-Elise translated this question,” Magda writes, “I elbowed her as firmly as I could without being obvious. Without missing a beat and without changing her expression, she completed the question then added, still in French, ‘… but it is better not to say so.’” All but one hand stayed down.
By the time Magda was Lagerälteste, camp ‘elder’ for a sub-camp of up to 30,000 women, she was becoming more brazen. She now knew many of the prominent SS and could predict their behaviours. Josef Mengele, a notorious SS doctor who conducted dreadful experiments on dozens of prisoners, including children, would occasionally come into camp and
“I couldn’t save everyone but I could save a few, at least for another day.”
‘select’ a group of women. They would be sent ‘up the chimney’, making space for new arrivals.
“Mengele seemed to have a special dislike for the younger women. During one selection he chose 800 girls no older than 16.” They were sent into an empty block for the night, to be transported away the next day. Magda knew Mengele would likely lose interest, having made his decision. Overnight, after her assistant, Gerda, had plied the guard with illicit vodka, Magda sneaked all 800 girls out and distributed them into other blocks. “The next morning the guard was gone and, of course, the block was empty.” Nothing more was said. “Gerda and I and a bottle of alcohol saved the lives of 800 girls for another day.”
With all these interventions came enormous risk. A number of times Magda was on the precipice of death. She was found out after releasing two girls one night – the women were in a group listed for scientific experimentation. Though she escaped an almost certain death sentence, she was sent to a stehbunker, a standing cell, for seven nights. Four women were locked into a tiny space. “There was just enough room for us to stand … We could barely move our arms, and certainly not lift them. It was truly horrific.” Magda survived the week only because [of] some male prisoners who helped her rest during the day.
Magda was one of very few Auschwitz prisoners who lived through and survived three years of the hell of this concentration camp. Then, just before it was finally liberated by the Russian army in
January of 1945, she and four other cousins and friends made it through the infamous death marches and, eventually, back to what was left of their home towns and homes. She eventually married Béla, who she’d met in the camp (that’s another story!). After Maya and Eva were born, the family moved to Israel and then to Australia in 1956, where Magda and Béla built new, full lives. Béla died in 2002 and Magda passed away in 2006, aged 89.
Magda’s legacy
Just before her mother’s death, Maya typed the words ‘Magda Blau’ into her search engine to see what would come up. One link jumped out at her. It was headed, ‘Debra Fisher on Magda Blau, a survivor she never met.’ Intrigued, Maya opened the story and immediately saw a picture of an arm tattooed with the numbers 2318. It was Magda’s number … but it wasn’t Magda’s arm!
Maya got in touch with Debra Fisher and discovered that Debra had learnt of Magda’s story through the Holocaust museum in Washington. Wanting to tattoo her arm as a tribute to survivors, she tried but failed to make contact with Magda, then got the tattoo anyway. She hoped she was doing the right thing. Debra was overjoyed to hear from Maya and the women eventually met in New York, moments before going on air for a radio show to share the story.
“Meeting Debra was uncanny and incredible,” says Maya. “I was so encouraged by what she had done that I decided I just had to tell my mother’s story as it needed to be told. To be publishing that story now in
The Nazis Knew My Name is a dream
come true.”