Renee Schwalb

Vienna, home to some 175,000 Jews before World War II, was a major center of European Jewry. Vienna was also the intellectual heart of the Palestine resettlement movement. Most of the city's Jews lived in two large districts on the east side of the Danube Canal. Renee's father owned a prosperous men's clothing store in the city.

1933-39: German forces occupied Austria in March 1938. Anti-Jewish measures were quickly imposed. Renee's father was prohibited from doing business and his store was seized. He left for America in early 1939 with the intention of having Renee and her mother join him there. But in the interim, the situation for Jews worsened and Renee and her mother were forced to flee to Belgium to escape deportation. She was 2 years old.

1940-44: Renee's mother gave her to a man from the "underground." It was because she was Jewish, he said. She was taken to some nuns who renamed her Suzanne LeDent. At the convent's school she played only rarely with the other children, because they might have asked her too many questions. Renee learned to pray using a string of beads called a rosary, and won medals for memorizing Catholic prayers. In 1943, when the Germans learned the nuns had been hiding Jews, Renee was moved first to a family and then to a Protestant reform school near Brussels.

After the war, Renee was reunited with her mother. Five years later they immigrated to the United States.