Franci's War: The incredible true story of one woman's survival of the Holocaust

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Once too controversial to publish, this is the incredible story, told for the very first time, of a young Jewish seamstress who survived five Nazi concentration camps What are you willing to do to survive? What are you willing to endure if it means you might live? In the summer of 1942, twenty-two-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labour camps in Hamburg, and finally Bergen Belsen. Franci, a spirited and glamorous young woman, was known among her fellow inmates as the Prague dress designer. Having endured the transportation of her parents, she never forgot her mother's parting words- 'Your only duty to us is to stay alive'. During an Auschwitz selection, Franci would spontaneously lie to Nazi officer Dr Josef Mengele, and claim to be an electrician. It was a split-second decision that would go on to endanger - and save - her life. Unpublished for 50 years, Franci's War is an astonishing account of one woman's attempt to survive. Heartbreaking and candid, Franci finds the light in her darkest years and the horrors she faces instill in her, strength and resilience to survive and to live again. She gives voice to the women prisoners in her tight-knit circle of friends. Her testimony sheds new light on the alliances, love affairs, and sexual barter that took place during the Holocaust, offering a compelling insight into the resilience and courage of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation.

At the age of twenty-two, Frances Epstein, her first husband, and her parents were deported from Prague. She would spend the next six years moving between different concentration camps, before being liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945. She was the only immediate member of her family to survive the Holocaust.

Franci's story is a testament to the human spirit . . . a mesmerising read * Jewish Chronicle * The extraordinary true story of the girl who survived the holocaust against all of the odds . . . In this astonishing memoir, she lays bare the appalling sacrifices she and other women had to make to survive * Eastern Daily Press * Achingly moving, gives much-needed hope . . . Deserves the status both as a valuable historical source and as a stand-out memoir * Daily Express * First-hand accounts of life in Nazi death camps never lose their terrible power but few are as extraordinary as Franci's War * Mail on Sunday *