House of Willie Sterner

"... [Helen Shein] was gorgeous and smart. Helen had been brought up in a very religious home and we lived in the same building on Zamoyskiego 10. We loved each other very much and my family loved her too ... Of course, we did not have a television at that time, but in the evening we read books and Polish and Jewish newspapers and listened to the radio or records played on a gramophone. "

Willie Sterner was born in 1919 in Wolbrom, a small town north of Cracow, where he has spent the first decade of his life. Being one of the seven children, he was raised in an observant close-knit Jewish family and joy. Hersz Leib Sterner, his father, was a painter, who relocated his family to Cracow in 1928.

Once the war broke out, Willie and his brother were forced to work for Nazis with no food and no pay. Trying to save the family, they moved back to Wolbrom in 1941. Yet in the late summer 1942, his mother and four sisters were sent to Treblinka, while he and his brother and father were locked in the Cracow's ghetto where they survived until October. His father and two brothers were killed during one of the violent roundups. Following their death Willie was captured and survived the war as a laborer at the Oscar Schiendler's factory that was located in Cracow. From spring 1943 Willie Sterner worked there as a printer. By summer 1944, it was decided to move the factory to Moravia as the Soviet Army was approaching, but Sterner did not make it to the final list of those who were saved. Instead, he was sent back to KL Plaszow, then to Mauthausen, Gusen II and Gunskirchen. After the war, he worked as a chef of the Jewish police force in Wels DP Camp and then in Linz-Bindermichl. After spending three years in Austria he made his way to Canada in 1948. Together with his wife, whom he met during the death march from Gusen to Gunskirchen and later married in 1946, they put roots in Montreal. Willie Sterner died in 2011.