Running for her life

Françoise Frenkel was a Polish Jew, who adored books and spent much of her early life studying and working in Paris. Her passion for French literature led her to open the first French bookshop in Berlin in 1921, a resounding success in spite of the predominantly Francophobe sentiment in Germany following the first world war. She happily reminisces over its ‘curiously mixed clientele’: ‘Famous artists, celebrities and well-heeled women pore over the fashion magazines, speaking in hushed tones so as not to disturb the philosopher buried in his Pascal.’ It soon became a place of readings, lectures, plays and parties and an essential stop for any French writer passing through Berlin.

The problems began in 1935, escalating from laborious new customs paperwork to Frenkel being summoned by the Gestapo, although the bookshop was spared the atrocity of Kristallnacht as it was a foreign business. Unsurprisingly, Frenkel was unable to sell the shop, so in August 1939 she paid off her debts and fled to Paris, where the cultural attaché praised her for ‘remaining at your post until the very last minute. Just like a valiant soldier’.

The dream was over, the nightmare well and truly begun. We are too familiar with the sorts of events Frenkel endured over the coming years as a Jew in occupied France —and the cycle of fleeing, hiding, being arrested, escaping, while death circled ever closer — yet this account is particularly vital. Frenkel wrote it in 1943–44 (in Switzerland, which she did eventually reach, throwing herself over the barbed wire border as a soldier approached), so the events are recent and the prose has a terrible immediacy. Certain episodes burn into the reader’s vision with the intensity of nightmares. For instance, when Jewish children were forcibly separated from their parents:

In one hotel on the Côte d’Azur, a woman who had escaped the round-ups threw herself from the window with her young child.