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

Once deemed too controversial to publish, and now told for the very first time is the incredible and candid true story of one young woman’s survival of 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.

Franci’s story is an astonishing account of one woman’s survival through the worst years of her life. 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 a 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. Above all, Franci’s War asks us to explore what it takes to survive, and what it means to truly live.