Photograph of refugees in Sweden, ca. 1945

Ilse Schindler was born in upper Silesia and during the Nazi era was forced into the ghetto in Sosnowiec, Poland. She was sent to Annaberg labor camp and from there to Auschwitz and by the end of 1944 was sent to Ravensbrück and then to Beendorf near Magdeburg, Germany, where she worked for several months in a salt mine where parts for V2 missiles were manufactured. As the Allied troops approached, work was no longer possible and she was then shipped from one small camp to the next until liberation on May 2, 1945.