Claude Romney was born in Paris a few months before the Second World War, which she survived with her mother in the South of France while her father, a laboratory physician specializing in blood proteins, was a prisoner-doctor in Auschwitz and Ebensee, and miraculously survived. She studied at the Sorbonne and holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics from the University of Paris VIII. She has been living in Canada for most of her working life. She is now Professor Emerita at the University of Calgary and has been an active member of the Vancouver group of Holocaust Child Survivors.