Ester (Stela) Acević was born in Prilep (Yugoslavia, now North Macedonia) in 1940. Her mother Bukica was Jewish and came from Kosovo; her non-Jewish father Blagoje Acević was Serbian. Under Italian occupation in 1941, they joined a partisan group and placed Stela in her grandmother’s care. Stela and her grandmother were interned in a camp in Kosovska Mitrovica (now Mitrovica, Kosovo). There, the grandmother was secretly visited by her former employee, the Romani woman Hajrija Imeri-Mihaljić. Her visitor could not help her escape, but she smuggled Stela out of the camp and took her into her home.
After the end of the war, Stela learned that Hajrija Imeri-Mihaljić was not her biological mother. Her grandmother had been murdered and there was no trace of her parents. Stela was put into a Jewish children’s home in Belgrade. By chance, her mother found her there, having survived. Stela spoke only Romani and missed her foster parents. Stela lost contact to Hajrija Imeri-Mihaljić when she and her mother emigrated to Israel. In 1969 Stela Levi, by then married and a mother of three children, went to Yugoslavia to look for her rescuer, but did not find her.