Klara Bornett

Klara Bornett was born into a large Jewish family, one of several children born to Heinrich Kohn and Clotilde Stern in Wien (Vienna). Active in gymnastics and diving in her youth, she was one of Austria’s most successful divers during the 1920s, winning several national championship titles in both springboard and high diving. She competed at two Olympic Games, at Paris 1924 and Amsterdam 1928 with her best result coming in her first appearance in which she finished sixth in the women’s springboard event.

The highlight of her career, however, was her first-place finish at the European Championships held at Bologna in 1927 in the three-metre springboard event. Winning two more consecutive national championships in 1928 and 1929, Bornett was seemingly at the height of her career when she was later forced to retire by 1930 due to an illness which saw her begin to lose her visual faculties and eventually go blind.

In 1921, she married Albert Bornett. At the beginning of World War II in the late 1930s, she and her husband and a brother attempted to escape to Belgium when, according to her family, she apparently became ill and died during the evacuation. Her husband later settled briefly in Belgium until his capture and deportation by the Germans to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1942. Some of her other siblings later settled in the United States and Germany following the war.