Françoise Fren­k­el's WW2 memoirs

Françoise Fren­k­el (1889-1975) was born to Jewish parents in Piotr­ków Poland, near Lodz. After an introduction saying how she became fascinated with books as a child, she continued with her studies at the Sorbonne and did an apprenticeship with an anti­qu­arian bookseller. Not surprisingly, she soon developed a profess­ional passion for literature, especially French literature.

No Place To Lay one's Head

by Francoise Frenkel

translated by Stephanie Smee, 2017

Germany In 1921 Françoise set up the first French-language bookshop in Berlin, La Maison du Livre, recognising the appetite for French culture in Berlin after WW1. Her business successfully appealed to classy people: diplomats, aut­hors, artists. In the heady years of the Weimar Republic (1918-33) and after, her bookshop became a cultural centre in the city.

She worked with her Russian-born husband Simon Raich­enstein until 1933. Ident­ity papers were denied him by French auth­orities who is­s­ued him with a deportation order. He was taken to Drancy detention camp near Paris and killed in Ausch­witz in July 1942.

Frenkel’s dream job lasted until 1939 but the end was seen with the descent into Naz­ism, racial gen­o­cide and the start of WW2. Nazi officers & Hitler Youths crept over the streets, destroying Jewish-run businesses, smashing windows and burning synagog­ues. Krist­allnacht Nov 1938 was the worst.

Françoise had to escape to France, just before war broke out. Only days after her depart­ure from Germany, Nazi Germany bomb­ed Paris, causing terrible destruction. Frenkel would have stayed in Paris but she was forced to keep mov­ing. In the meantime Mar­shal Philippe Petain’s regime remained in Vichy as the nominal gov­ern­ment of France, op­erating as a client state of Nazi Germ­any from Nov 1942 on.

Françoise and many other city residents sought refuge in the loveliest parts of France - first Avignon (Sth), then Nice (S.E). Frenkel her­self was constantly moved from safe house to safe house, from refugee hotel to messy refugee hotel. Nice was overrun with ref­ug­ees who were hiding in poor living cond­itions; families were split up. Françoise understood that she surv­ived only because some stran­g­ers risked their lives to protect her. She escaped many crises with Nazi police officers rounding up Jews for concentration camps, but informants were clearly everywhere.

Just as it was looking as if most non-Jews were either brutal them­selves or uncaring about Jews, her memoir became a tap dance bet­ween acknowledging human cruelty and being in awe of human kind­ness. In fact her most valuable insights were into the behaviour of French people specifically under Occupation in Vichy France.

Deportation of Foreign Jews from Paris 

to Drancy detention camp.

Frenkel conveyed a huge debt of gratitude in her work. I would not have. My grandfather searched Eastern Europe for his sister, from the last letter he received (1942) until his 1971 death. My father-in-law searched for his brother, sister-in-law and 6 nieces/nephews after his liberation from Ukraine; all had been exterm­in­ated except one child.

Switzerland  From Dec 1942 on Françoise attempted to reach neutral Switzerland, her bids for safety being des­perate. In her book, she detailed how in 1943 she finally smug­gled herself across the border from Haute-Savoie. Eventually her memoir No Place to Lay One’s Head was written on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland and published in 1945 by Geneva-based publish­ers Jeheber.

What happened in Françoise Frenkel's subsequent life? She returned to live in Nice and died there in 1975. But not even a photo of the author exists. Very limited extra informat­ion came from a list of persons who were given per­mis­sion to cros­s­ the border into Switz­erland during WW2 and who obtained a resid­ence permit there. Those documents are now in State Archives of Gen­eva.

After the 1945 publication, the memoir was largely forgotten until recently when a copy was accidentally discovered in Nice. In the preface of the book’s newest publication, French novelist/Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano added to the story of refugees fleeing terror the world over.

Of course Frenkel’s book reminded me of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, the girl who survived in hiding in Amsterdam until the family was deported to death camps in Poland in 1944. Miraculously her father Otto Frank survived and miraculously he found Anne’s diary. And Catherine Taylor  added another comparison - Irène Némirovsky’s unfin­ish­ed novel Suite Française, which was miraculously discovered by her daughter, decades after Némirovsky perished at Aus­chwitz-Birkenau. Like No Place to Lay One’s Head, these two books works were lucky to be published. But unlike Frenkel, Anne Frank became a well known sym­bol of the Holocaust.

Division of France between German Occupied Zone and Vichy Free Zone

highlighting Paris, Drancy, Nice (N) in France and Geneva (G) in Switzerland

Penguin Random House's Vintage published a translation of Frenkel’s French book, Rien où poser sa tête, in 2017. Hopefully the orig­in­al style was capt­ured in English by the Australian translator Steph­an­ie Smee.

Frenkel’s quest for refuge in war-torn Europe reminds us all of our contemp­orary debates reg­arding refugees. Like the author back in WW2, many unlucky citizens in the modern world need to flee starv­ation, war or ethnic oppression. No country wants them today, so fleeing is still an alien­ating, unforgiving journey of necessity. The story today is as tragic today as it was when my own husband was carried over the mountains between home (Czechoslovakia) and the DP camps in Austria after the war. Worse, probably.

For a detailed review, read Brigette Manion in Asymptote.