About the Book
Françoise Frenkel was a Jewish woman born in Poland and enamoured of all things literary and French. In 1921 she set up the first French-language bookshop in Berlin, recognising the craving for French culture in that city in the wake of the First World War. Her business was a success – attracting diplomats and celebrities, authors and artists. But life in Berlin for a Jewish woman and a foreigner soon became untenable.
Frenkel was forced to flee to Paris and compelled to keep moving as she attempted to survive in a world disintegrating around her. Her observations of and interactions with the French people, both those who would give her up to the Nazi authorities and those who risked their own lives and families by offering her refuge, show how humanity strives to assert itself even in the darkest times.
Frenkel’s book, written with piercing clarity and sensibility in the immediate aftermath of her escape to Switzerland, was originally published in 1945 in Geneva. But only recently was a copy of this forgotten work discovered and a decision made at French publisher Gallimard to republish it, seventy years later.
Very little is known of Françoise Frenkel’s subsequent life, except that she returned to live in Nice where she had spent much of her time during the war, and where she died in 1975.
No Place to Lay One’s Head is the story of refugees, those fleeing terror, the world over.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Preface
No Place to Lay One’s Head
Foreword
I In the service of French thought in Germany
II Paris
III Avignon
IV Vichy
V Avignon
VI Nice
VII Somewhere in the mountains
VIII Return to Nice
IX Grenoble
X At the border
XI Annecy
XII Saint-Julien
XIII Annecy
XIV At the border
XV Heading for Switzerland
Chronology
Dossier
Photographic Credits
Acknowledgements
Copyright Notice
Preface
The copy of No Place to Lay One’s Head that was recently found, I’m told, in Nice, in an Emmaus Companions charity jumble sale, had a curious effect on me. Perhaps because it had been printed in Switzerland in September 1945 for Geneva-based publishers Jeheber. That publishing house, now defunct, had in 1942 published L’aventure vient de la mer, a French translation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Frenchman’s Creek, published in London the previous year, one of those English or American novels banned by the Nazi censors but sold covertly and even on the black market in Paris under the Occupation.
We don’t know what became of Françoise Frenkel following the publication of No Place to Lay One’s Head. At the end of her book, she recounts how in 1943 she smuggled herself across the border into Switzerland from Haute-Savoie. According to the note at the end of the foreword, she wrote No Place to Lay One’s Head in Switzerland ‘on the shores of Lake Lucerne, 1943–1944’. Sometimes strange coincidences occur: in a letter sent by Maurice Sachs a few months earlier, in November 1942, from a house in the Orne where he had taken refuge, I happen upon the title of Françoise Frenkel’s book in the course of a sentence: ‘It appears it’s rather my path, if not my fate, to have no place to lay my head.’
What was Françoise Frenkel’s life like after the war? These are the scarce pieces of information I have been able to gather about her thus far: she recalls, in her account, the French bookshop she had established in Berlin in the early 1920s – the only French bookshop in the city – and which she apparently managed until 1939. In July of that year, facing imminent danger, she abandons Berlin in all haste for Paris. But in Corine Defrance’s study ‘La Maison du Livre français à Berlin (1923–1933)’ we learn that she ran this bookshop with her husband, a certain Simon Raichenstein, about whom she says not a word in her book. This phantom husband is supposed to have left Berlin for France at the end of 1933 under a Nansen passport. It seems identity papers were denied him by the French authorities, who issued him with a deportation order. But he remained in Paris. He was taken from Drancy to Auschwitz in the convoy of 24 July 1942. He had been born in Russia, in Mogilev, and it appears he lived in the 14th arrondissement.
We find a trace of Françoise Frenkel among the State Archives of the Canton of Geneva in the list of persons recorded at the Geneva border during the Second World War; that is to say, those who were granted permission to remain in Switzerland after crossing the border. That list provides us with her true full name: Raichenstein-Frenkel, Frymeta, Idesa; her date of birth: 14 July 1889; and her country of origin: Poland.
One last trace of Françoise Frenkel, fifteen years later: a compensation claim in her name dated 1958. It refers to a trunk she had left in the ‘Colisée’ storage repository at 45 Rue du Colisée in Paris in May 1940, and which was confiscated on 14 November 1942 on the grounds it was ‘Jewish property’. In 1960, she is awarded compensation in the sum of 3500 marks for the despoliation of her trunk.
What did it contain? One coypu fur coat. One coat with an opossum collar. Two woollen dresses. A black raincoat. A dressing-gown from Grünfeld’s. An umbrella. A parasol. Two pairs of shoes. A handbag. An electric heat pad. An Erika portable typewriter. A Universal portable typewriter. Gloves, socks and handkerchiefs …
Do we really need to know more? I don’t believe we do. What makes No Place to Lay One’s Head unique is that we cannot precisely identify its author. This eyewitness account of the life of a woman hunted through the south of France and Haute-Savoie during the Occupation is all the more striking in that it reads like the testimony of an anonymous woman, much as A Woman in Berlin – also published in Switzerland in the 1950s – was thought to be for a long time.
If we think back to our first readings of works of literature, around the age of fourteen, we knew nothing of their authors either, whether it was Shakespeare or Stendhal. But that naïve and direct reading left its mark on us forever, as if each book were a sort of meteorite. In this day and age writers appear on television screens and at book fairs; they’re constantly interposing themselves between their works and their readers, and turning into travelling salesmen. We miss our childhood years when we would read The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, written under the pseudonym B. Traven, a man whose identity remained unknown even to his publishers.
I prefer not to know what Françoise Frenkel’s face looked like, nor the twists and turns of her life after the war, nor the date of her death. Thus, her book will always remain for me that letter from an unknown woman, a letter forgotten poste restante for an eternity, that you’ve received in error, it seems, but that perhaps was intended for you. That curious impression I had upon reading No Place to Lay One’s Head was also the effect of hearing the voice of somebody whose face one can’t quite make out in the half-light and who is recounting an episode from their life. And that reminded me of the overnight trains of my youth, not in the ‘sleeping cars’ but the seated compartments which used to create a great sense of intimacy between passengers, and where somebody, under the night-light, would end up confiding in you or even confessing to you, as if in the privacy of a confessional. It was the feeling that you would no doubt never see each other again which lent weight to this abrupt intimacy. Brief encounters. You retain a suspended memory of them, the memory of somebody who didn’t have time to tell you everything. The same can be said of Françoise Frenkel’s book, written seventy years ago but in the confusion of the moment, still suffering from shock.
I ended up tracking down the a
ddress of the bookshop run by Françoise Frenkel: 39 Passauer Strasse; telephone: Bavaria 20-20, between Schöneberg and Charlottenburg. I imagine them in that bookshop, she and her husband, who is absent from her book. At the time she was writing, she was probably unaware of his fate. Simon Raichenstein had a Nansen passport, since he belonged to that group of émigrés from Russia. There were more than one hundred thousand of them in Berlin in the early 1920s. They had settled in the Charlottenburg neighbourhood, which, as a result, had come to be known as ‘Charlottengrad’. Many of these White Russians spoke French, and I assume they were the main customers of Mr and Mrs Raichenstein’s bookshop. Vladimir Nabokov, who used to live in the area, no doubt one evening crossed the threshold of that bookshop. No need to consult archives or study photos. All you need do, I’m sure, if you want to find a trace of Françoise Frenkel in Berlin, is read Nabokov’s Berlin stories and novels, which he wrote in Russian and which are the most moving of his works. You can picture her on the crepuscular avenues and in the poorly lit apartments of Nabokov’s descriptions. Leafing through The Gift, Nabokov’s last Russian novel and a farewell to his mother tongue, you come across the description of a bookstore which must have resembled that of Françoise Frenkel and the enigmatic Simon Raichenstein. ‘Crossing Wittenberg Square, where, as if in a colour film, roses trembled in the breeze around an old-fashioned stairway that descended into an underground station, he made his way towards the bookshop … the lights were still on … Books were still being sold to taxi drivers on the nightshift, and he made out, through the yellow opacity of the shop-window, the silhouette of Misha Berezovski …’
In the last fifty pages of her book, Françoise Frenkel recounts a first failed attempt to cross the Swiss border. She is taken to the police station in Saint-Julien together with ‘two girls in tears, a dazed-looking little boy and a woman worn out from exhaustion and cold’. The following day she is transferred by bus, together with other fugitives who had been arrested, to the prison in Annecy.
I find these pages moving, having spent many years in this part of Haute-Savoie. Annecy, Thônes, the Glières Plateau, Megève, Le Grand-Bornand … Memories of the war, of resistance fighters, lived on during my childhood and adolescent years. Fingerprints. Handcuffs. She appears before a tribunal of sorts. As luck would have it, she is given a ‘minimum suspended sentence and pronounced free’. The next day she is released from custody. On leaving the prison, she walks in the sunshine through the streets of Annecy. I am familiar with the path she happens to take. She hears the murmur of a fountain that I, too, used to hear in the silent, stiflingly hot early afternoons on the shores of the lake at the end of the Pâquier promenade.
Her second attempt to smuggle herself across the Swiss border is a success. I often used to take a bus to Geneva from the Annecy bus station. I had noticed it would pass through customs with never any inspection whatsoever. Yet, as it approached the border, from the Saint-Julien-en-Genevois side, I would feel a slight tightening within. Perhaps the memory of a sense of menace still hovered in the air.
PATRICK MODIANO
Foreword
It is the duty of those who have survived to bear witness to ensure the dead are not forgotten, nor humble acts of self-sacrifice left unacknowledged.
May these pages inspire a reverent thought for those forever silenced, worn down along the way or murdered.
I dedicate this book to the MEN AND WOMEN OF GOOD WILL who, generously, with unfailing courage, opposed the will to violence and resisted to the end.
Dear reader, accord them the grateful affection deserved by all such magnanimous acts!
In my thoughts, too, are those Swiss friends who took my hand just as I felt myself sinking, and the bright smile of my friend Lie, who helped me continue to live.
F. F.
In Switzerland,
on the shores of Lake Lucerne,
1943–1944
I
In the service of French thought in Germany
I don’t know exactly when I first felt the calling to be a bookseller. As a very young girl, I could spend hours leafing through a picture book or a large illustrated tome.
My favourite presents were books, which would pile up on the shelves along the walls of my childhood bedroom.
For my sixteenth birthday, my parents allowed me to order my own bookcase. To the astonishment of the joiner, I designed and had built an armoire to be glazed on all four sides. I positioned this piece of furniture of my dreams in the middle of my bedroom.
Not wanting to spoil my delight, my mother let me be and I was able to admire my classics in the publishers’ beautiful bindings, and the modern, contemporary authors whose bindings I would lovingly choose myself, indulging my imagination.
Balzac came dressed in red leather, Sienkiewicz in yellow morocco, Tolstoy in parchment, Reymont’s Paysans clad in the fabric of an old peasant’s neckerchief.
Later, the armoire took its place against the wall, itself covered in a beautiful, bright cretonne fabric, and this move in no way diminished my delight.
A good deal of time has passed since then …
Life had led me to Paris, for long years of study and work.
Every spare moment I had was spent along the riverbanks in front of the bouquinistes’ old, damp cases of books. Sometimes I would dig up a book from the eighteenth century, in which I was particularly interested at the time. Sometimes I thought I had discovered a document, a rare volume, an old letter; always a fresh, if fleeting, moment of joy.
Memories!
The Rue des Saints-Pères, with its dusty, dark boutiques, repositories of accumulated treasures, what a world of marvellous discoveries! Oh, the bewitching years of my youth!
And time spent lingering on the corner of Rue des Écoles and Boulevard Saint-Michel at that huge bookshop that used to spill out onto the footpath. Works with uncut pages, read on the diagonal amid the noise of the street: horns honking, students and girls chatting and laughing, music, refrains of popular songs …
Far from distracting readers, this hustle and bustle was part of our student life. If that commotion had disappeared and those voices had fallen silent, it would quite simply have been impossible to keep reading on the corner of the boulevard: a peculiar sense of oppression would have weighed upon us all …
But happily there was no such thing to worry about then. Certainly, the war had reduced the pitch of our general gaiety by a few tones, but Paris was alive with its animated, insouciant atmosphere. The Latin Quarter rippled with youth, street corners still hummed with song, and book-lovers continued their furtive reading in front of tables laden with treasures provided so generously to everybody by publishers and booksellers, with affable benevolence, in a perfectly disinterested gesture.
At the end of the first war, I returned to my home town. After my first outpourings of delight at finding my loved ones safe and sound, I hurried to my childhood bedroom.
I stopped in my tracks, astonished! The walls had been stripped: the floral cretonne had been skilfully peeled off and removed. All that remained were newspapers stuck up against the plaster. My beautiful library with its four glass panels, the wonder of my youthful imagination, stood empty, seemingly ashamed of its own decadence.
The piano, too, had disappeared from the drawing room.
Everything had been taken away under the Occupation of 1914–1918.
But my family was alive and well. I spent a happy holiday in their midst and returned to France full of vim and vigour.
When I didn’t have lectures at the Sorbonne, I studied diligently at the Bibliothèque Nationale, as well as at the Sainte-Geneviève Library, my favourite place.
Upon my return from Poland, I worked in the afternoons at a bookstore in Rue Gay-Lussac.
And so I grew to know my ‘bookish’ clientele. I would try to fathom their desires, understand their tastes, their beliefs and their leanings, try to guess at the rationale behind their admiration of, their enthusiasm for, their delight
or displeasure with a work.
By and by, after observing the way a book was held, almost tenderly, the way pages were delicately turned, reverently read or hastily leafed through, thoughtlessly, the book then put back on the table, sometimes so carelessly that its corners, its most precious part, were damaged as a result, I came to be able to see into a character, a spirit, a state of mind. I would place the book I considered appropriate down close to a reader – discreetly, however, so they wouldn’t feel it had been suggested. If they happened to like it, I glowed.
I started to grow fond of the clientele. I would accompany some of the customers on their way in my thoughts, thinking about the impact the book they had taken would have on them; then, I would impatiently await their return to learn their reactions.
But there were other times, too … when I would be annoyed by vandals. For there were some people who desecrated a work, heaping it with angry criticism and objections, until its contents were quite falsely distorted!
I have to admit, much to my bewilderment, that it was more often women lacking a certain moderation.
Thus I had discovered the necessary complement to a book: its reader.
Generally speaking, a perfect harmony reigned between one and the other in the little store on Rue Gay-Lussac.
Every spare moment I had was spent at publishers’ showrooms, where I would go to discover old acquaintances as well as new releases, objects of surprise and delight.
When the time came for me to choose a profession, I didn’t hesitate: I followed my calling to be a bookseller.
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