Mila Racine

Origins and early life

Mila Racine was born in Moscow on 14 September 1919 to Georges and Bassia Hirsch, Russian Jews who fled the Bolshevik regime and settled in Paris in 1926, where the family name was made French as Racine. She grew up in the Jewish youth movements of the capital and was running a local branch of the Zionist youth movement when the war came.

Work and career

From 1942 she worked on the clandestine line to Switzerland, leading convoys of Jewish children and adults from the Haute-Savoie to Annemasse and across the border, one of the small number of young women who did this because they could pass more easily and because someone had to walk in front. On 21 October 1943 a convoy she was leading was intercepted by the Germans near Saint-Julien-en-Genevois; she was carrying false papers and gave a false name, and her comrades' silence kept her Jewish identity from being established.

She was held at the Montluc prison in Lyon, deported to Ravensbrück by the convoy that left Compiègne on 31 January 1944, and transferred to Mauthausen, where she was killed in a bombing raid at Amstetten on 20 March 1945, at twenty-five. Marianne Cohn took over her convoys and was murdered in her turn.