Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh (826 Hazelwood Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15217)
Suggested donation of $5 at the door; free for Holocaust survivors and students
Monday, March 23 at 6:00 pm- 7:30pm
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In the summer of 1942, twenty-two year-old Franci Rabinek arrived at Terezín, forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezín to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labor camps in Hamburg, and Bergen Belsen. 

Franci was known in her group as the Prague dress designer who lied to Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz, saying she was an electrician, thereby endangering and saving her own life. Franci’s War (2020), her posthumously published memoir, is the powerful testimony of one incredibly strong young woman who survived. In this memoir, she offers her intense and candid account of those years.

This event will feature a book talk by Franci’s daughter, Helen Epstein. Helen Epstein is the author, co-author or translator of ten books of literary non-fiction, starting with Children of the Holocaust (1979), one of the first books to examine the inter-generational transmission of trauma. Her most recent book is the memoir The Long Half-Lives of Love and Trauma (2018).