France’s New Prime Minister Overcame Tragedy in Her Youth

PARIS — On her first official trip last week as France’s new prime minister, Élisabeth Borne was asked what dreams she harbored when she was a young girl.

“I was attracted to sciences,” Ms. Borne spoke during a discussion about job opportunities and gender equality with residents from Les Mureaux, 20 miles northwest Paris.

“The story would be a bit too long to tell,” she added. “But when your life journey is difficult, as mine was, and things happen in your personal life that aren’t very nice, there was something reassuring about sciences.”

Ms. Borne did not elaborate. However, Borne is now in the spotlight as one the two women in France who can be prime minister. Many people in the country are just beginning to understand what she meant.

Ms. Borne’s father, Joseph Bornstein, a Jew who was part of the resistance in Nazi-occupied France and who survived deportation to Auschwitz, killed himself when she was 11 years old. Her parents’ pharmaceutical business in Paris had gone bankrupt, abruptly interrupting the family’s middle-class life and throwing Ms. Borne, their sister, and their mother were in dire financial straits.

Then, she was made a “pupille de la Nation” — or ward of the nation — a status that France can grant to minors when one or both of their parents die in exceptional circumstances, like war or a terrorist attack, and that provides financial aid and other forms of assistance to cover education and living costs.

She excelled at math, joined elite engineering schools like the École Polytechnique; rose to leadership roles at Paris City Hall, the Paris metro authority, and other top institutions and companies; and handled multiple positions and portfolios in government.

She will now lead the government of President Emmanuel Macron, whose cabinet was announced last week following his re-election.

Ms. Borne, 61, is an answer to an election campaign that had been dominated by candidates on the far right, including Éric Zemmour, who suggested — against historical evidence — that France’s collaborationist wartime Vichy government saved French Jews.

Ms. Borne has not spoken out about her past and her office didn’t respond to a request for comment. But past interviews offer glimpses suggesting that her father’s death put her on a path of focused perseverance, instilling a strong belief in France’s promise that hard work pays off and that the state plays a key role in fostering upward mobility.

“I might be the prototype of Republican meritocracy,” Ms. Borne spoke to Journal du Dimanche on Saturday. “If the Republic hadn’t been by my side, I certainly wouldn’t be here.”

Nicolas Lebourg, a French historian and political scientist who wrote recently about Joseph Bornstein’s detention in French camps during World War II, said that the new prime minister’s past resonated because it exemplified integration.

“You have a story that leads you, in two generations, from foreigners arrested by the French police, detained in French camps because they are Jewish, and who became French, to a prime minister,” Mr. Lebourg said.

However, Ms. Borne, who has been very private about her private life.

A diligent but discreet member of Mr. Macron’s first-term cabinet, as minister of transportation, then environment and finally labor, she rarely sought the limelight. Instead, she was known for mastering the technical intricacies of government and for being extremely demanding with subordinates — “Borne-out” was one reported nickname.

Anne-Marie Idrac is a former transport and commerce minister who knew Ms. Borne since the 1990s, said that she was “very representative of French meritocracy.”

“She is very smart, very competent and very rational,” said Ms. Idrac, who was the president of France’s national railway company in the mid 2000s when Ms. Borne was the head for strategy. “She’s someone who trusts numbers and data.”

Ms. Idrac, now president of France Logistique (a trade group representing French logistic companies), said that Ms. Borne has not spoken out about her past in professional settings.

“To be quite honest, I never heard her explicitly mention it,” she said.

Ms. Borne mentioned her father’s death but rarely elaborated on its circumstances. Last year, she told the television broadcaster C8 that “it was a bit shocking to lose my father so young, and I found math to be something quite reassuring, quite rational.”

“I wanted my financial independence, and so I held on,” Ms. Borne said, adding that admission into the École Polytechnique — where French students get free tuition and a stipend — was “a real relief.”

Ms. Borne’s uncle Isaac was deported with her father. He died in 2016, but a decade earlier he had given an extensive account of the family’s history in an interview recorded by the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah and France’s National Audiovisual Institute.

In it, he recalled that Ms. Borne’s grandparents, fleeing antisemitism, had left Poland for Belgium in the 1920s. Joseph Bornstein — Borensztejn, originally — was one of four brothers, born in 1924 in Antwerp, where Ms. Borne’s grandfather, Zelig, worked in the diamond trade.

The family, practicing Jews who spoke Yiddish and Flemish, left for France after Ms. Borne’s grandmother died of an illness and war broke out in Europe. They ended up, paperless, in the southwestern city of Nîmes, where Isaac and Joseph were arrested but escaped from French detention camps in southwestern France in 1941 and 1942.

Mr. Lebourg, the historian, noted that many in France were still unfamiliar with its history of detaining people in the 1930s and 1940s, like Jews, Gypsies or Spaniards fleeing the country’s civil war — even before conflict broke out with Germany and the Vichy regime took hold.

“It’s a page of collective memory that is still blurry,” Mr. Lebourg said, adding that Ms. Borne’s story could bring it into focus.

During the war, Ms. Borne’s family eventually headed to Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps (one of her uncles had previously been deported from southwestern France and killed). Her father was part of a Jewish resistance group that transported men and messages to units in Tarn for several months.

Zelig and his children were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Gestapo on Christmas Day 1943. Isaac and Joseph were sent to the forced labor section of camp. Their father and younger brother were taken away to Birkenau, and never returned.

Isaac candidly recalled the daily humiliations and deprivations in the camp and the fear that Joseph, an epileptic would have seizures.

“We always got along well,” he said. “We always shared everything, him with me and I with him, because I kept a close eye on him.”

Both brothers survived and both returned to France after liberation. Two young sisters approached them on a Paris train platform, offering their help. They adopted the Bornstein brothers, first in Paris, and then in Normandy. This was in the same area that Ms. Borne spent part of her childhood in Paris, where she is currently running for a seat at Parliament next month.

Joseph later converted to Catholicism and married one of the sisters, Marguerite Lescène — Ms. Borne’s mother — in 1948. He became a French citizen. He officially adopted the name Borne. The couple took over the Lescène family pharmaceutical business in Paris.

Still, Joseph’s wartime experience, which he didn’t like to discuss, had changed him. Isaac stated that financial problems and crippling epileptic seizures made matters worse. “But I don’t think he could stand Auschwitz, either,” he added.

In 1972, Ms. Borne’s father threw himself out of a window.

Sunday’s interview was with the Journal du Dimanche. She was asked who her first thought was when she was named prime minister.

“I thought of my father,” Ms. Borne replied.