The Nazis knew my name. Magda Hellinger, Maya Lee & David Brewster. 2021.

In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young Slovakian women were deported to Poland on the second transportation of Jewish people sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The women were told they’d be working at a shoe factory.

At Auschwitz the SS soon discovered that by putting Jewish prisoners in charge of the day-to-day running of the accommodation blocks, camp administration and workforces, they could both reduce the number of guards required and deflect the distrust of the prisoner population away from themselves.  Magda was one such prisoner selected for leadership and over three years served in many prisoner leader roles, from room leader to block leader - at one time in charge of the notorious Experimental Block 10 where reproductive experiments were performed on hundreds of women - and eventually camp leader, responsible for 30,000 women.

She found herself constantly walking a dangerously fine line: using every possible opportunity to save lives while avoiding suspicion by the SS, and risking torture or execution. Through her bold intelligence, sheer audacity, inner strength and shrewd survival instincts, she was able to rise above the horror and cruelty of the camps and build pivotal relationships with the women under her watch, and even some of Auschwitz’s most notorious Nazi senior officers including the Commandant Josef Kramer.