My mother, Renee Bornstein, who has died aged 90, was a remarkable woman of strength, resilience and grace. As a child of Jewish parents in wartime France, she experienced extraordinary challenges, including a harrowing interrogation by the Gestapo in a prison cell at the age of 10.
She survived the Nazi occupation to establish a happy adult life, first in Munich, then in Manchester, where she worked as a property manager while raising her children and grandchildren.
Born in Strasbourg, Renee was the daughter of Samuel Koenig, a clothes and linen merchant, and Frieda (nee Schwarzkachel), a property manager. In 1939, when Renee was five, the family were evacuated, along with all French Strasbourgoises, to St Junien, in the south-west of France, and she went to Aquiba school.
Following the Nazi occupation of France from 1940, Renee and her family spent periods in hiding, before her parents made the agonising decision to send her and her sister Helen and brother Joe away to safety in Switzerland. They were entrusted to resistance workers who were taking a group of children by train, then lorry, to the Swiss border.
At the border, they were stopped by the Gestapo, and taken to prison for questioning. Ten-year-old Renee was subjected to repeated questioning at gunpoint, while other children were beaten and tortured. After two weeks, the local mayor negotiated their freedom, and they were allowed into Switzerland. Renee and her siblings were eventually reunited with their parents, who had survived the war in hiding.
Following school, Renee worked in her father’s clothing shop. In 1963, she married Ernst Bornstein, a doctor and dentist, and a Holocaust survivor who wrote a firsthand account of his time in seven concentration camps, Die Lange Nacht (The Long Night, 1967), which was published in English in 2016. The couple settled in Munich, where Ernst had lived after his liberation from a nearby concentration camp and subsequent hospitalisation in the city, and they had three children.
Following Ernst’s death in 1978, Renee and her young children relocated to Manchester, where two of her sisters lived, and where she found warmth and support within the local community. She ensured her home was a nurturing haven with a continual supply of chocolate and streusel yeast cake. True to her Hebrew name, Rachel, she exemplified unconditional love and care, and often became a “token” mother and grandmother to her children’s and grandchildren’s friends.
Renee also worked as a property manager, which she continued until the end of her life, and maintained her interest in international news, music, dancing and travelling.
She is survived by her three children, Muriel, Alain and me, 11 grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren, and by her siblings, Helen, Joe, Antoinette and Henri.
