Françoise Frenkel

Françoise Frenkel (14 July 1889 – 18 January 1975) was a Polish-Jewish writer and bookseller. With her husband, in 1921 she opened the "Maison du Livre français", Berlin's first specialist French book store, which she ran till 1939.

On 27 August 1939 she belatedly escaped from Germany as a passenger on a special train to Paris which had been organised by the French embassy. Shortly before June 1940, which was when the invading German army reached Paris, she joined the thousands of Parisians fleeing to the south of the country. As the Nazi invaders tightened their grip on southern France she was forced to flee again, crossing into Switzerland near Annecy, on her third attempt, in June 1943. She was allowed to stay in Geneva, her cousin the cinema producer Lazar Wechsler vouching for her, and she survived.

She wrote an account of her adventures which was published (in French) in September 1945 by J.-H. Jeheber S.A, a Genevan publishing house that has long ago disappeared. Very few copies were produced and the book was quickly forgotten. However, 35 years after the author's death it was rediscovered in a car boot sale in southern France. "Rien où poser sa tête" ("No place to rest her head") was republished in 2015, also being translated into German for the first time.

Life Family provenance and early years Frymeta Idesa Frenkel, who later changed her first name to Françoise, was born into an intellectual Polish-Jewish family in Piotrków Trybunalski, a midsized prosperous industrial town in Congress Poland, at that time a western province of the Russian Empire. She then moved on to the Sorbonne in Paris where the focus of her study – later also her life's defining passion – was French literature.

At first, Berlin's intellectual elite approached this new supply of francophone literature only with caution, but at this time, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, there were also around 100,000 Russian refugees living in Berlin, many of whom were well educated and welcomed the chance to read French classics in the original language. The enterprise acquired a certain cachet, becoming a cultural focus, described by one source as "one of the top addresses for all francophiles" in the city. There was no news from her widowed mother in Poland. On 10 May 1940 German forces invaded France and on 22 June 1940 an armistice was agreed between the French and German governments.

Frenkel escaped to the south, but finding Vichy overcrowded she carried on to Clermont-Ferrand. She had reached the front-line. Frenkel's first weeks in Vichy France were in Avignon, then in Nice. An attempted marriage with a Frenchman for security failed.

Frenkel having obtained a visa for Switzerland soon after her arrival in France in 1939, she delayed going there for a couple of years. In August 1942, she narrowly avoided capture and deportation, then the police carried out a raid on the little "Hotel Arche de Noe" ("Noah's Ark Hotel") where she was staying. All the hotel's other Jewish guests were escorted into police trucks. She went "underground" and was dependent for survival on "good" French people. Under Italian officials, Frenkel's presence was granted a level of legal status. Friends organised a Swiss visa for her and just a few days before its expiry she succeeded in entering Switzerland at the third attempt.

Later years Françoise Frenkel was already 53 when she crossed the frontier near Annecy. She lived for more than another thirty years, dying at Nice on 18 January 1975. Very little is known about her final decades. She was again in Berlin in 1959 visiting the divided city to apply for compensation in respect of her lost goods while escaping in 1939. In 1960 the West German government paid her DM 3,500 as "reparation".