Franci's War

The captivating memoir of a spirited and glamorous young Jewish fashion designer who survived the Holocaust, with an afterword by her daughter, Helen Epstein.

In the summer of 1942, twenty-two year-old Franci Rabinek Epstein arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her six-year journey through several camps during the Second World War, from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the forced labor in Hamburg, and Bergen Belsen. After the liberation by the British in April 1945, she finally returned to Prague, a survivor.

Franci was known in her group as the Prague dress designer who lied to Dr. Mengele at an Auschwitz selection, saying she was an electrician, resulting in an assignment to do electrical work in Hamburg, an occupation that both endangered and saved her life. Franci had a no-nonsense attitude though she never lacked a sense of humor, and in this memoir, she offers her intense, candid, and sometimes funny account of those dark years, which included the women in her tight-knit circle of friends.

Franci’s War is a powerful testimony of the horrors of the Holocaust, and also a testament to the strength and bravery of those who endured.

Franci Rabinek Epstein was born into a privileged family in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1920 and educated at the Ecole Francaiseand Lycee de Prague and the Deutsches Staatsrealgymnasium. She dropped out after her fourth year to apprentice in her mother’s haute-couture Salon. At 18, Franci became the owner of the Salon. In 1940 she married Joe Solar. She regarded the Nazi concentration camps as her university. After liberation, she returned to Prague an orphan and a widow and re-established a fashion salon: Salon Solarova, and married Kurt Epstein in 1946. In 1948, after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, she emigrated to New York City and established a new fashion salon on the Upper West Side. She lectured at universities on her experience during the war before dying of a brain aneurysm in 1989. Her audio survivor testimony (1974) is archived at the New York Public Library; her video testimony(1985) is archived at Yale University.

Helen Epstein is a veteran arts journalist and author or translator of ten books of non-fiction including the trilogy Children of the Holocaust, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History; and The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma. Born in Prague, she grew up in New York City. Her reviews and articles have appeared in many newspapers, magazines, and websites.