Françoise Frenkel was born in Poland in 1889. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, she opened the first French-language bookshop in Berlin with her husband. In 1939, after her bookshop was destroyed in Kristallnacht, she sought refuge in Paris, fleeing to occupied Vichy after the German invasion the following year. After several years in hiding, she escaped across the border to Switzerland, where she wrote a memoir documenting her refugee experience. Originally published in 1945 as Rien où poser sa tête (No Place to Lay One's Head), the memoir was rediscovered in an attic in Southern France in 2010 and republished in the original French. Frenkel died in Nice in 1975.
