French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne’s childhood was marked by the suicide of her father in 1972, when she was just 11 years old. Joseph Borne, whose original name was Bornstein, was a Jewish resistance fighter of Polish origin who survived the hell of Auschwitz but never quite recovered from the experience.
When President Emmanuel Macron picked Élisabeth Borne as France’s new prime minister earlier this month, not too many French people knew about the 61-year-old career bureaucrat’s family background.
Borne, who became France’s first female prime minister since the 1990s, has been discreet about her private life and her family heritage, which was marked by the horrors of World War II.
Her father Joseph, a Jewish resistance fighter, was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944. While he was freed a year later, the ghosts of the past – the atrocities at Auschwitz, the loss of loved ones – continued to haunt him. Joseph Borne committed suicide when his daughter was only 11 years old.
“It wasn’t always easy. I lost my father when I was very young. And so, we ended up with my mother, who had two daughters and did not have much of an income,” she told French channel C8 in a 2021 interview.
Borne traces her family’s roots to Poland. Her grandfather Zelig Bornstein – who perished in the camps along with two of his sons – fled anti-Semitism in the 1920s for Belgium, where he found work with a diamond dealer. Joseph was born in Antwerp in 1925 under the surname Bornstein. He was one of four boys, Léon born in 1921, Isaac in 1923 and Albert in 1930.
When World War II broke out, the family was forced into exile once again, fleeing to southern France where they sought refuge in Toulouse, Montauban, and then in Nîmes. The Bornstein boys’ mother, Anna, died aged 36.
La photo date de 1939. Zelig Bornstein, né à…
Source : france24
