Far from being just another WWII story, No Place to Lay One’s Head is the extraordinary journey of a private citizen caught between a rock (the Nazi occupation of France) and a hard place (being Jewish). Françoise Frenkel’s story has finally come to light again after 72 years of obscurity, having been recently discovered in a dusty attic of southern France.
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The background story of the rediscovery of this book is as fascinating as the spellbinding pages within it, leaving us with something of a mystery surrounding the author’s subsequent life. It seems fitting that we are left with this mystery though, because the author herself was never to know the fate of her entire family during the brutal years she was absent from them.
Françoise is Polish by birth, but French at heart. She leaves Poland for Paris at about 24 years of age, where she studies at university to gain a degree in literature. Her great ambition is to open a French bookstore in Poland, but since that niche market is already flourishing there, she decides to open her store in Berlin instead. It is 1921.
As there is no other French bookshop in Berlin at the time, it begins to attract the glitterati of literature who routinely travel throughout Europe. Local celebrities as well as authors, diplomats and artists frequent the shop, often giving talks and entertaining the shop’s clientele.
Françoise manages the shop alone after her husband sets out for Paris in 1933 never to return, but by 1939 Berlin has become a very dangerous place for a Jewish woman running a French business. She flees Berlin and returns to Paris, where her life becomes increasingly precarious as the Nazi regime steadily flexes its muscle throughout the entire country.
Françoise has many friends and contacts who generously help her at every opportunity, as she must move constantly in order to avoid being deported to a concentration camp. She is imprisoned after her first escape attempt to Switzerland, but is acquitted thanks to a clever lawyer. On her third escape attempt in May 1943, she finally crosses the Swiss border, albeit amid heart-stopping moments when all seems lost.
Over the next two years while staying at Lake Lucerne, Mme Frenkel wrote the agonising story of her struggles. It is a beautifully written memoir, factual, lucid and without judgement – a wonderful tribute to this intelligent and fascinating woman who miraculously survived seemingly insurmountable odds where countless others failed.
No Place to Lay One’s Head has been skilfully translated by Sydney-based Stephanie Smee, making this incredible story available in English for the first time, many decades after its initial publication in 1945. Stephanie has charmingly and carefully preserved the authentic language patterns and expressions of the day.
The thoughtful addition of a time line and detailed dossier, replete with photographs and excerpts from various documents, gives further insight into the courageous and remarkable Françoise. In a moving inscription on a copy of her book given to an old and faithful friend, the Reverend Father Noir, she writes from Nice in December 1945: I would be so grateful for your prayers – I seek inner peace: I am grieving for so many and know not where my family have been laid to rest. How great is my suffering.
At the end of this book one is left with the lingering hope that Françoise Frenkel not only found relief from her suffering, but was also able to regain that elusive inner peace during the remaining 30 years of her life, of which very little is known. It is indeed (to quote from the back cover) ‘the story of refugees, those fleeing terror, the world over’. Mme Frenkel died at the age of 86 in Nice in 1975.
No Place To Lay One’s Head
Françoise Frenkel
Vintage Penguin Random House