Escape to France, escape from France

For every Jew who escaped Nazi-occupied territory during World War II, there must have been a good story to tell. One such story is found in A Bookshop in Berlin by Francoise Frenkel, first published in 1945.

Frenkel was a young Polish Jew who, in the 1930s, decided to open a French bookstore in Germany. Others told her such a bookstore in Berlin would surely fail, not because she was a Jew but because of the hard feelings left over from the Great War against anything French. She opened it anyway and soon discovered a surprising number of loyal customers.

The trouble started for her in 1935 as the Nazis began to gain power. Eventually most of the books, magazines and newspapers in her store became forbidden, and her Jewishness became an issue. In 1939 she decided it was time to flee to Paris. But then, in short order, the Nazis went to war and conquered France.

The rest of the book tells of her flight from one part of France to another, always trying to stay a step ahead of both the Nazis and the French collaborators. She found French people willing to risk their own lives to protect her, as well as others willing to betray her. She was arrested more than once, but fortunately by French authorities unwilling to turn her over to the Germans. After two failed attempts to escape into Switzerland, she finally made it through the barb wire to freedom.

Frenkel's book is hardly an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Much of it is rather tedious. Still it's a dramatic story of just one Jew's successful attempt to escape the reach of the Nazis. There were other such stories, but not nearly enough of them.