Renee Bornstein

Renee Bornstein, (née Koenig; 10 February 1934 – 28 November 2024) was a French-born Holocaust survivor, who lived in Manchester, England. She was the wife of Ernst Israel Bornstein, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and author of Die Lange Nacht, a memoir of his experiences during WWII, published in English as The Long Night.

Personal life Bornstein was born Renee Koenig to Samuel and Frieda in Strasbourg, France, on 10 February 1934. She has an older sister Helen and younger brother, Joe. At age 5 the family was relocated to St Junien in the south-west of France. Bornstein was Jewish and a survivor of the Holocaust. In 1964, she married Dr Ernst Israel Bornstein, a doctor and a dentist, who she met through mutual friends when he was 42 and she was 30. They lived in Munich, Germany and had three children: Noemie, Muriel and Alain. Ernst died in 1978, at the age of 55, due to a heart condition attributed to the years of starvation and forced labour during his teenage years in Nazi labour and concentration camps.

Bornstein later moved to Manchester, England with her children. She died from pancreatic cancer on 28 November 2024, at the age of 90.

The Holocaust In 1942, the Germans invaded France and would search villages looking for Jews to deport to concentration camps and death camps. Bornstein and her family would rush to hide in barns, farms, convents and the cellars of churches to avoid being captured. As the Nazis tightened their grip on occupied France, Bornstein's parents decided to send their three children to Switzerland, giving them false names and papers so that they could join non-Jewish children at a holiday camp ostensibly to escape the bombing (although most of the children were actually Jews fleeing the Nazis). Bornstein was given the name Renee Blanche. Bornstein was aged 10 and her siblings Helen and Joe were 13 and 9. They hid in a Catholic convent in France for two weeks. and has been endorsed by Lord Finkelstein, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Jonathan Dimbleby and Dan Snow. A new German edition was published in 2020 with a foreword by Charlotte Knobloch, before being translated into other languages.

Legacy In May 2019, Bornstein and two other Holocaust survivors were invited back to the town of Annemasse, and a ceremony was held in the town centre in their honour, unveiling a plaque with their names.

BBC One screened Bornstein's story as part of 'Me, My Family and The Holocaust' in November 2020.

In 2021, she was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) for services to Holocaust education and commemoration.