Lili Pohlmann

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]