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Françoise Frenkel

Biography

Françoise Frenkel

Françoise Frenkel was born in Poland in 1889. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, she opened the first French-language bookshop in Berlin with her husband. In the summer of 1939, with war looming, Frenkel fled to Paris. She sought refuge across occupied France for the next several years until finally escaping across the border to Switzerland, where she wrote a memoir documenting her refugee experience. Her memoir, originally published in 1945 as RIEN OU POSER SA TETE (NO PLACE TO LAY ONE'S HEAD), was rediscovered in an attic in southern France in 2010 and republished in the original French as well as in a dozen other languages. This is its first publication in the United States. Frenkel died in Nice in 1975.

Françoise Frenkel

Books by Françoise Frenkel

A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis
by Françoise Frenkel - Memoir, Nonfiction

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel --- a Jewish woman from Poland --- opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin’s first French bookshop. It becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Françoise’s dream finally shatters on Kristallnacht in November 1938, as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed. La Maison du Livre is miraculously spared, but fear of persecution eventually forces Françoise on a desperate, lonely flight to Paris. Secreted away from one safe house to the next, Françoise survives at the heroic hands of strangers risking their lives to protect her.