Holocaust refugee and educator Renee Bornstein, BEM - The Jewish Chronicle

She was a child of ten when she and her two siblings were stopped at the Swiss border by the Gestapo who took them to prison and proceeded to interrogate them at gunpoint. Beside them, lying curled up on a plank was a young boy. The Nazi commandant told them, with his gun at their faces: “If you don’t tell the truth you will end up beaten like him.”

Renee Bornstein, who has died aged 90, could remember the incessant questions: ‘Are you Jewish? How old are you? Are you Jewish? Wat is your parents’ address? ‘ Years later the intense blue of the Nazi’s eyes stayed with her as she repeatedly answered ‘No’ she was not Jewish. She gave her name as Renee Blanche and a false address.

But the child refugee from Nazi occupied France, saw and heard things in that prison that no ten year old should ever experience. Among them the screams of a dying woman in a nearby cell, who had earlier showed them kindness. “The screaming would follow me my entire life,” Renee recalled. “She screamed until she died.”

In her life in Strasbourg with her parents, Frieda nee Schwarzkachel, a property manager and Samuel Koenig, a textile merchant, her older sister Helen and younger brother Joe, she had already seen the danger growing for Jews. Friends, neighbours suddenly disappeared, and in 1939 her family and others were evacuated to St Junien in south west France.

“Life became very hard and scary. Jewish people were being taken away and we didn’t know where. Whenever the Nazis came to our village, we had to run and hide in barns, farms or cellars. My parents ....made the hard decision to send us away (to Switzerland) in June 1944.I was ten years old. Helen was 13 and Joe was nine.”

Assigned to the care of Resistance workers , they boarded a train to Lyon, armed with false papers, false identities and a false destination. The sound of Nazi boots up and down the carriages terrified them. On arrival they were first hidden by Catholic nuns for the first two weeks, where Renee was very frightened and missed her parents so much that she refused to eat and could hardly sleep. While the nuns were mainly compassionate, one of them told her that, as she was going to die she should be baptised a Catholic so she could go to heaven. She refused. Even at that young age she her faith was important to her.

The children eventually boarded a lorry with some 32 others, aged 2-15.S During the journey towards Switzerland Nazi guards were constantly in the lookout for Jewish people. The sound of their marching terrified her. “For years afterwards whenever I saw a man in uniform it would send shivers down my spine.

“When we got off the train, we were met by a woman called Marianne Cohn. She was 22 years old. She was going to help us escape to Switzerland. There weren’t Nazis there and we would be safe.

“A group of German soldiers appeared, with barking dogs. Marianne told them we were going to a holiday camp. They kept asking us ‘Are you Jewish?’ We said no, but they took us to a prison.”

They were incarcerated in the Prison du Pax in the French border town of Annemasse, and found themselves in a large, empty room where a soldier pointed his gun at them and repeatedly asked if they were Jewish, which they repeatedly denied. They were eventually returned to their cells.

“Every day Marianne was taken away and beaten,” Renee continued. “Some people tried to save her, but she didn’t escape because she had promised the parents that she would not leave us children alone. The Nazis killed Marianne. I will never forget her. She was a true heroine.”

The courageous Marianne was beaten up, raped, tortured and murdered by the Nazis, who left her body in a ditch. She remained true to her commitment to the children in her care and refused to give any of them away. A school in Annemasse was later named after her. She saved 200 children.

After two weeks, another saviour arrived in the shape of the Lord Mayor of Annemasse, Jean Deffaugt. He persuaded the Nazis to let the children out of prison and send them to a children’s home. But the Gestapo returned every week to count the children. “If any of us children had escaped they said they would kill all of us and the Lord Mayor”.

Finally the Nazis left the town and Renee and her siblings were taken by members of the Maquis to a refugee centre where they lived for another three months. Their story had an unusually happy ending, when they were eventually reunited with their parents, who had survived the war in hiding. The family returned to liberated France in early 1945. Renee resumed her education, and then worked for her father as a fabric buyer.

It was at a bar mitzvah that she met her future husband, fellow survivor, Polish born Ernst Israel Bornstein. They married in 1964 and had three children. Having lost his parents and younger sisters in Auschwitz, he was liberated in Munich at the end of the war and was one of the very few Jews to settle there, studying medicine and dentistry.

For Renee, however, living in Bavaria proved extremely difficult, though she admitted to having made good friends there. Ernst wrote a personal and acclaimed account of his experiences in seven concentration camps, Die Lange Nacht (The Long Night, 1967) published in English in 2016. He wrote the memoir on discovering how many of his patients knew nothing of the Holocaust, or thought it had been exaggerated, despite living in the birthplace of Nazism.

However, malnutrition in the camps had preyed on his health and he developed a heart condition from which he died, at the early age of 55 in 1978. Renee, now widowed, took her children, Noemi, 13, Marielle11 and Alain, 7 to Manchester to join her siblings, where she was warmly welcomed by the Jewish community.

Like many survivors, Renee buried her past and did not speak of it for 66 years, rarely discussing it even with her husband. She focused on rebuilding her life. Her daughter, Noemie Lopian, a GP and Holocaust e founder of Holocaust Matters,.com, finally persuaded her to tell her story at a Holocaust Memorial event in 2011. As she spoke, still retaining her French accent, the full weight of her memories returned, and although they triggered anxiety attacks, she found the courage to take her story on to schools and synagogues, ensuring that the tragic story of the Jews in mid 20th Century Europe would not be forgotten.

Renee’s testimony to HMD includes a moving tribute to the courageous young Resistance heroine and Jewish Girl Guide, Marianne Cohn, assigned the task of rescuing the children from the Nazis’ clutches and send them to Switzerland.

In May, 2019 Renee was invited back to Annemasse for a ceremony in her honour, where a plaque was unveiled. Her story was screened by BBC1 in November the following year as part of “Me, My Family and the Holocaust.” In 2021 she was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) for services to Holocaust education and commemoration.

Her daughter, Noemie, said that her mother – “true to her Hebrew name, exemplified unconditional love and care, and often became a “token” mother and grandmother to her children’s and grandchildren’s friends.”

A woman of many interests, Renee continued to work as a property manager until the end of her life, and pursued her interest in international news, music, dancing and travelling.

Renee Bornstein is survived by her children, Noemi, Marielle and Alain and grandchildren.

Renee Bornstein: born February 10, 1934. Died November 28, 2024

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Holocaust