Franci Rabinek Epstein (1920–1989)

Franci Rabinek Epstein was born to a privileged, secular Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the only child of Emil and Josefa Rabinek. She was educated at the Lycée français de Prague and a German gymnasium (high school) before dropping out to apprentice in her mother's haute couture dress salon. At 18, Franci became the owner of the salon. In 1940, she married Joe Solar. Her world changed forever with Nazi Germany's invasion of her country in World War II. In August 1942, Joe was deported to the ghetto-concentration camp at Terezin (Theresienstadt). Franci and her parents followed a month later. Emil and Josefa were sent on to Maly Trostinets in Belarus, where they were shot to death. Joe was taken away by the Gestapo, and Franci only learned of his death after the war. Over the next three years, she was moved from one concentration camp and slave labor camp to another, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. She was known in her group for having lied about her occupation during a selection at Auschwitz, saying she was an electrician -- an action that both saved and endangered her life. At Neugraben in Germany, when told to perform as an electrician, she was able to use basic knowledge learned from her engineer father to install telephone lines, fix wiring, and electrify new parts of the camp. She survived to be liberated by British troops in April 1945, and returned to Prague. There she married Kurt Epstein, her former swimming coach and a fellow survivor. Franci gave birth to her first child, Helen Epstein, a future writer, in Prague; soon afterwards, the family fled the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia for the USA. They settled in New York City, where Franci became a fashion designer for wealthy and famous women at her Manhattan salon. In the 1970s, she wrote a frank, sexually explicit memoir of her Holocaust experiences, based in part on diaries she kept at the time, that no publisher would accept. After her death, Helen Epstein published the memoir as Franci's War: A Woman's Story of Survival, and wrote the afterword.