Ella Blumenthal

In 2021, she was the subject of the documentary, I am Here, which documented her life in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Concentration camps. Blumenthal currently lives in Cape Town and has four children, eleven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

Audience Choice Award, Durban International Film Festival, 2021

Jury Award for Best SA Documentary (Oscar Qualifying), Durban International Film Festival, 2021 Best Director, Jozi Film Festival, 2021

Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary, Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, 2021

Best Director, Africa Human Rights Film Festival, 2021

Audience Choice Award, Africa Human Rights Film Festival, 2021

After the war, Blumenthal went to Warsaw with the hope of finding her remaining family members who had not been in the Warsaw Ghetto. Blumenthal was able to make contact with Rothstein's father. He had survived by leaving the Warsaw Ghetto and moving to Tel Aviv. He managed to get Blumenthal sent to Paris, where she lived until 1947, when the Rothsteins got a visa for her to join them in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv, Blumenthal met her future husband, who she married 13 days after meeting him. Out of twenty-three immediate family members, she and the Rothsteins were the only survivors of the Holocaust.

In November 1944, Blumenthal and Rothstein were moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They remained here until the British Army liberated the camp on April 15, 1945.

During her time in the Ghetto, Blumenthals family members kept being taken and put onto transports to concentration and death camps. By the time of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Blumenthal had only two family members left, her father and her eldest niece, Roma Rothstein. From April 19-May 16, 1943, Blumenthal helped to participate in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. After the uprising failed, she and the remaining Jews were transported to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps.

From 1943 to 1945, Blumenthal stayed in three concentration camps: Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. In Majdanek, her father, along with most of the other older prisoners, was sent to the gas chambers. Blumenthal and Rothstein were also sent to the gas chambers, but by chance there were 700 women in the gas chamber when the "quota" was 500. Because of this, 200 women were removed from the gas chamber. Blumenthal and Rothstein were two of the lucky ones to be removed. As Blumenthal said in a testimony:

Ella Blumenthal (born July 25, 1921) is a Holocaust survivor. In 1940, she was moved to the Warsaw Ghetto, where she participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She and her niece Roma Rothstein were the only members of their immediate family to survive the Holocaust. She is the subject of the 2021 documentary I am Here.

Ella Blumenthal was born on July 25, 1921, in Warsaw, Poland. She was the youngest of seven children. Her father was a textile merchant. She had a happy childhood and was a happy teenager until the Nazi Invasion of Poland in 1939. In October 1940, she was forcibly put into the Warsaw Ghetto along with her family. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Blumenthal helped an underground Jewish organization publish and distribute leaflets. As one of the leaflets said,