Willie Sterner (1919–2011)

Willie Sterner was born to a Jewish family in Wolbrom, Poland, the eldest of seven children of Hirsch Lieb and Hinda Raizel Sterner. In 1929, the family moved to Kraków, where Willie attended vocational school and later entered his father's painting business. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in World War II, the family moved back to Wolbrom. When the Nazi roundups began in 1942, Willie's mother and four sisters were deported to Treblinka, where they died. Willie, his father, and two brothers were then sent to the Kraków Ghetto. His father and brothers were also deported and killed. In March 1943, Willie, now the sole survivor of his family, was among 8,000 Jews deported to the Plaszów slave labor camp. Later that year, he went to work as a painter in Oskar Schindler's enamelware factory near Kraków and became Schindler's personal art restorer. As the Red Army approached in early 1945, Willie was sent back to Płaszów, then to Mauthausen, and finally on a brutal death march to the Gunskirchen subcamp with other prisoners. He stayed alive to be liberated in May 1945, and recuperated from typhus. He spent three years in displaced persons camps in Austria. He married Eva Mrowska, another survivor whom he had first met on the death march. The couple emigrated to Canada in 1948, settling in Montreal, and had two children. Willie eventually opened his own painting company. He volunteered for the Holocaust Centre in Montreal and the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Miami Beach, Florida, and gave public talks about his experiences. His memoir, The Shadows Behind Me (French translation, Les Ombres du passé), was published in 2010 by the Azrieli Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.