Ella (Gabriele or Gabrielle) Stein was born on 20 October 1883 in Vienna to lawyer (Hof- und Gerichtsadvokat) August Stein (1852–1890) and Josefine Elisabeth Wagner (1850–1933).

Her father was Jewish, while her mother was Catholic, and they had married in the Jewish Community of Vienna in 1877. However, in the same year her father left the Jewish community of Vienna. Initially Ella and her siblings did not belong to any religious community, but in 1885 she was baptized as a Catholic along with her brothers in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. Her father was baptized as a Catholic in St. Stephen's Cathedral on 28 January 1886, when her parents also remarried in a Catholic ceremony on the same day after nine years of marriage. Her father died four years later. Her grandmother Karoline remained a member of the Jewish Community until her death in 1899.

On 8 April 1908 she married Thorleif (von) Paus, the Norwegian vice-consul and acting consul-general in Vienna. Her official name in Austria was Ella (Gabriele) von Paus from 1908 until the particle "von" was banned in Austria in 1919. Towards the end of WWI she and Thorleif divorced, and he moved back to Oslo while she remained in Vienna with their children. Thorleif remarried twice, and later lived at a castle and manor in Sweden with his third wife, also named Ella. Following Anschluss in 1938 Ella Paus fled Austria with her daughter Helvig and moved to Oslo, Norway, where she died in 1971. Her son Ole Paus had moved to Norway in 1929. She helped raise her grandson, the famous singer Ole Paus, whose mother died when he was four.

Literature

Anna Staudacher (2009). "... meldet den Austritt aus dem mosaischen Glauben": 18000 Austritte aus dem Judentum in Wien, 1868–1914: Namen – Quellen – Daten. Peter Lang. p. 8. ISBN 9783631558324