Die Elektrikerin

The memories of Czech Jew Franci Rabinek (1920 – 1989) of her traumatic deportation are an unusual testament to the power of resilience in many respects. Franci's journey of survival begins in Prague, where she was a successful fashion designer. In 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt along with her parents, who, along with her husband, did not survive. The stages of her survival journey after the ghetto included Auschwitz, the subcamps of the Neuengamme concentration camp – Dessauer Ufer, Neugraben, and Tiefstack – and finally Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated in 1945. With great openness, the courage for (self-)criticism, and unexpected humor, she recounts from the perspective of a once affluent young woman in her early twenties how she managed to survive: through solidarity, friendship, resourcefulness, and seizing opportunities, such as when she encounters camp doctor Josef Mengele, pretending to be an electrician. Not least because of its openness, the text remained unpublished for decades. It was only recently that it was published in the USA and in several European countries. The account of young Franci about her "journey into hell" appears for the first time in German translation, accompanied by an afterword from Franci's daughter Helen Epstein, a renowned author and member of the Holocaust successor generation.