- Biography
- Renate Winston (born Renate Schomberg) is the daughter of Sandor and Hela (Weinberg) Schomberg. She was born March 14, 1937, in Ungvar, Transcarpathia. Renate had one younger sister, Sylvia (b. 1938). The Schonberg family owned an oil refinery in Cop. In April 1944, after the Germans began deporting Jews from Hungarian-controlled Transcarpathia, Renate's parents obtained false papers for the girls in the names of Erzsebet and Katalin Lakatos. Their nanny, Frantiska Prva, agreed to take the girls to another location where they would not be recognized as Jews and take care of them. They moved to the small village of Lajosmizse near Budapest, where they remained until the end of the war. Renate's parents perished in Auschwitz. After the liberation, her aunt Bella Zwiebel, who had survived the war with her son, Imre, in Romania, found the girls. She took them and their nanny to her hometown of Nyiregyhaza, where they remained until 1946. At that time Bella was able to secure exit visas and took them all to Prague. After reaching the Czech capital, Frantiska decided to return home rather than to continue with them to the West. From Prague, Bella and the girls made their way to Stockholm. Bella received her American visa in 1947 and emigrated ahead of the children. After she left, Renate and Sylvia lived with a Jewish family by the name of Hirschfeldt. The girls were very happy in Sweden and would have been pleased to remain, but Bella wanted to be near them. Unable to obtain visas to the U.S., Renate and Sylvia went first to Canada, where they lived with a Jewish family for a year-and-a-half before joining Bella in the United States.