In her early career, Erna “Ernie” Appenzeller Kent was known as “ze map lady.”

The “ze” was a nod to her German accent — an instant charmer — and she was, well, the lady with the maps. It was 1971, pre-computers, and Kent was leading Maryland’s redistricting efforts. Kent and her colleagues went through census results and precinct maps painstakingly by hand. She felt the weight of her job: It was the first redistricting cycle with new census data since the adoption of the Civil Rights Act and the federal “one-man, one-vote” doctrine.

Kent would often bring home giant maps with proposed boundaries, and she’d sit at the kitchen table with her daughter and fill in the districts with colored pencils. In 2000, a Baltimore Sun columnist called Kent “‘the redistricting queen,’ the reigning expert on political maps, someone every politician wanted as a friend.”

In the male-dominated, mudslinging world of politics, Kent stood out — as a woman, and as someone who worked to make sure the government functioned well for the people it served. When faced with sexism or political opposition, she did as she always did, loved ones said. She survived.

Kent, a Holocaust survivor who fled Austria at age 10, built a life she loved in Columbia. She had two fulfilling marriages and raised two children. She studied policymaking and lobbied for legislation to make it easier to do business in Maryland. She retired to Florida when she felt her work was done, right around age 70.

She survived for another two-plus decades, never losing her sharp mind or wit, loved ones said. She died at her Sarasota home on July 8 of congestive heart failure, days shy of her 96th birthday.

She was born in the night on July 12, 1929, to Irma Dukes and William Appenzeller in Vienna. She had a younger brother, Max, who had severe disabilities and died as a toddler, but her parents didn’t talk to her about him.

In an autobiography, Kent recalled her early childhood as, generally, “a very happy one.” She attended some of the world’s first Montessori schools and spent summers in the country. She traveled with her mother, once spending a month on the Italian Riviera.

And then Adolf Hitler, leading Nazi Germany, invaded Austria.

Kent’s school closed. While Christians transferred to public schools, she and other Jewish students studied in a teacher’s home. They were barred from many public spaces. After Nazis attacked Jewish-owned businesses and homes on the day now known as Kristallnacht, Kent’s family decided to leave.

After a monthslong process of obtaining passports and visas, they fled to Italy in 1939. But once Italy entered the war, it was time to move again, now to Portugal. All the while, the family waited for their opportunity to enter the United States. It finally came in the summer of 1941, when Kent and her family boarded the SS Serpa Pinto, bound for New York.

In the city, Kent went back to a regular school schedule for the first time in about three years, and she learned English. She graduated from high school and went on to the City College of New York. As a teenager, she met John Honig, also a Viennese refugee, and they married.

The couple moved to Washington, D.C., and had two children, Gary and Judy, in the mid-1950s. Her children still under age 10, Kent enrolled at the George Washington University to finish her bachelor’s degree. Afterward, she earned a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Judy Honig isn’t sure exactly why her mother was so attracted to politics. Honig remembers growing up attending campaign events with her mother, who was always progressive. She volunteered with local political groups and helped integrate a diner in Prince George’s County. The only time she ran for office herself was in the early 1960s, when she ran for Orphans Court judge on a reform ticket, The Sun reported.

“I’m very much her daughter,” Judy Honig said. “I think my confidence, my ability to be articulate, my passion for progressive causes — all of that directly comes from my mother.”

Gary Honig didn’t share his mother’s love of politics, but she didn’t mind. She was “100% supportive” of his efforts to become an artist, and the two shared a deep emotional bond. He remembers his mother as “a giving person, as a person who was always there for whoever needed help.”

For fun, Kent loved traveling with her family. They took a cross-country road trip in the summer of 1968 and vacationed as close as Ocean City and as far as Europe.

Around the same time, Kent started working as a researcher at the Maryland Constitutional Convention, a role that eventually led her to the redistricting gig and a job with the governor’s office. Later, she became a lobbyist for the business community and ended her career in 2001 with the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.

Life had changed a lot by then. In 1975, she and John Honig divorced amicably, both acknowledging that they’d grown in different directions, their daughter said. Three years later, she married John “Jack” Kent Jr., an attorney and former legislator she’d met through her government work. They spent summers in Florida together before retiring there full time.

“It’s really heartwarming for me to realize that she really found what she was looking for,” Gary Honig said of his mother’s second marriage. “It was something that she had to have in her life, and she wasn’t going to just sit around. She was going to make her life the way she wanted it to be. And so every bit of what she did, she did it her way.”

In her second marriage, her love of travel again took center stage. She and Jack went all over the United States with stops abroad, including in China, Greece and Russia. When they came home, they’d share what they learned about different cultures with friends in a dinner club, where members chose a different country’s cuisine for each gathering.

Lucie Lapovsky, a close friend and former neighbor, was a founding member of the club, which lasted about three decades. She and Kent usually talked politics. Up until a week before she died, the two were “discussing the current state of the country and the world,” Lapovsky said.

Lapovsky was worried she might not get a chance to see her friend before she died, because she was abroad when Kent received bad news about her health earlier this year. But Kent survived until she returned, and Lapovsky asked if she could bring her anything.

Kent asked for Courvoisier and red wine, and they drank together like old times.

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