Renee Firestone survived Auschwitz-Birkenau as a teenager and built a life in California as a fashion designer, mother and Holocaust educator. She is, as of this writing, in her one hundred and second year and still alive. She is one of the last witnesses.
She was born Renee Weinfeld in 1924 in Užhorod in Czechoslovakia, in the eastern part of the country that was annexed by Hungary in 1939. The family was middle class, observant, comfortable. Her father owned a textile business. The Hungarian deportations of summer 1944, organised under Adolf Eichmann’s direct supervision, swept up around four hundred and thirty seven thousand Jews from the Hungarian countryside in around eight weeks. The Weinfelds were on one of the trains. Renee was nineteen. Her mother was sent to the gas chambers on the ramp. Her younger sister Klara was selected for the medical experiments and never came out.
Renee was tattooed on the left forearm and assigned to slave labour. She was on the death march out of Birkenau in January 1945, reached Liebau, a satellite of Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia, and was liberated there by Soviet forces in May. She found her father, Moshe, alive in a displaced persons’ camp; he died of typhus a few weeks later. She was twenty.
She emigrated to the United States in 1948. She trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, moved to Los Angeles, designed for Hollywood film studios in the 1950s and 1960s, and married Bernard Firestone, a fellow survivor. The work in design lasted thirty years. The Holocaust education work began in the 1980s, after the death of her husband and her own retirement.
Firestone gave thousands of testimonies in California schools. She co-founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation with Steven Spielberg in 1994 and helped train interviewers for what became the USC Shoah Foundation archive. She accompanied the documentary maker James Moll on his 1998 Oscar-winning film The Last Days, which followed her and four other Hungarian Holocaust survivors back to their hometowns. The 2001 sequel, A Daughter Returns to Auschwitz, traced her trip to Birkenau with her own daughter, Klara, named for the sister she had lost. The footage of Renee at the medical block at Auschwitz I, where she found in the German records the date and circumstances of her sister’s death, is one of the rawest moments in the documentary literature.
She continues, in her one hundred and second year, to give testimony when her health allows. She lives in Los Angeles. The work she did with the Shoah Foundation is one of the reasons that the recorded testimony of more than fifty thousand survivors is now in a single searchable archive at the University of Southern California.
See also
- Hungary
- Adolf Eichmann
- Digital Preservation of Testimony USC Shoah Foundation
- The USC Shoah Foundation
- Ruth Kluger
- Primo Levi
- Viktor Frankl
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards