Hilde Berger grew up in Berlin. She was a Polish citizen; her parents came from Poland. As a teenager, Hilde Berger wrote leaflets against the National Socialists. She was arrested in November 1936 and sentenced to a penal institution.
Shortly after her release in May 1939, Hilde Berger was deported to Poland as an “unwanted foreigner.” She returned to her parents in Borysław; they had been expelled from Berlin in 1938.
From 1942, Hilde Berger was drafted as a secretary for the oil company Karpathen-Öl AG. Soon after she started there, the commercial manager Berthold Beitz put her to work in his office. This initially protected her from deportation.
In the spring of 1944, Beitz was called up to the Wehrmacht and Hilde Berger was deported to Plaszow camp near Krakau. She worked in the camp office, which enabled her to place herself on Oskar Schindler’s protective transport list for his factory in Brünnlitz.
Together with the other women on the list, she was initially taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, however. Schindler managed to get the women back, and Hilde Berger worked as a typist in his office until her liberation.