Lili Pohlmann | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lili Stern 29 March 1930 Lvov, Poland |
| Died | 15 September 2021 (aged 91) |
| Occupation | Holocaust educator |
| Spouse | Eric Pohlmann |
Lili Stern-Pohlmann MBE (29 March 1930 – 15 September 2021) was a Holocaust survivor and educator.
Lili Stern was born in Lviv and raised in Kraków, the daughter of Filip Stern and Cecylia Bruek Stern. Her father was a bank manager and her mother was a dressmaker. She and her mother were the only members of their large extended family to survive the Holocaust.[1] They were sheltered by a German civil servant, Irmgard Wieth,[2] until Ukrainian Greek Catholic archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky placed them in a Ukrainian convent to protect them. After the war, she was taken to London with other refugee children by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld in 1946.[3] Her mother joined her in 1947.[4][5]
Pohlmann taught and spoke about her experiences during World War II, working with the Association of Jewish Refugees,[3] the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Imperial War Museum,[6] and other British groups. She was honorary president of Learning from the Righteous, and a director of the Centre for Jewish Culture in Kraków. She was awarded the Commander’s Cross of Polonia Restituta, and became a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2020, "for services to Holocaust Education, Awareness and Human Relations".[4] "If we, the last generation, don't talk about it, then that's it," she explained of her work. "I owe it to posterity."[7]
Lili Stern married Austrian actor Eric Pohlmann. He died in 1979. Her partner from 1985 was Ian Fleming's literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith; he died in 2016.[8][9] She had a daughter, Karen. Stern-Pohlmann died in 2021, aged 91 years.[4][10]