Zila Rennert (1908–1976)

Zila Rennert, née Rakowitzky, was born to a family of wealthy Jewish industrialists in Vilnius, Lithuania. She had a happy, carefree early childhood. The family was stranded in St. Petersburg at the time of the October Revolution and fled to Vienna in 1919 in a cattle car. In March 1938, she was studying medicine in Vienna and had just married a Polish engineer when Nazi Germany annexed Austria (Anschluss). She and her husband went to Poland, where in 1939, they found themselves under Russian occupation. The Russians ordered them deported to Siberia, but Zila, her husband, and their four-year-old daughter Ina managed to escape from the convoy of cattle cars heading east. They fled to Warsaw and assumed false identities as non-Jews. Her husband was arrested by the Gestapo and disappeared. Zila and Ina witnessed the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and survived the destruction of the city in August 1944. They were eventually seized by the Germans a few months later and deported to Auschwitz. The Germans slowed down the train of cattle cars on the outskirts of the camp, before bypassing it, and finally abandoned their prisoners in the open countryside5. Zila and Ina manage to return to Warsaw. During the post-war wave of anti-Semitism, they emigrated to France. There Zila resumed her medical studies and became a pioneer of painless childbirth techniques. She remarried to Michal Borwicz, a Polish-born historian and fellow survivor. She decided to write her memoirs and died in 1976 after having just completed the manuscript. It was published in 2997 as

Trois wagons à bestiaux, d'une guerre à l'autre à travers l'Europe centrale, 1914-1946 (Three Cattle Cars: From One War to Another Across Central Europe, 1914-1946).