The daughter of a Polish businessman and a Jewish-German mother, Stella Müller was born in Kraków in 1930. In March 1941 she and her family had to move into the Kraków ghetto. After it was brutally liquidated in March 1943, 13-year-old Stella and her family were taken to Plaszow forced labor camp outside the city. Thanks to her mother Berta, who passed her off as a 16-year-old, they were both able to work in the brush-binding workshop.
In October 1944, 300 women scheduled to work for the industrialist Oskar Schindler were transported from Plaszow to Auschwitz-Birkenau, including Stella and Berta Müller. Stella almost died of an infection there. Only thanks to a manipulated filing card did Stella and her mother end up three weeks later in Brünnlitz (Brněnec) in Moravia. Schindler had gone to great efforts to get the wives of his Jewish workers out of Auschwitz. In Schindler’s armaments factory, she was reunited with her father and brother. Stella Müller was liberated by the Red Army in the Brünnlitz factory on May 8, 1945. After the war, she and her family returned to Kraków.