9. A Dancer in a Hellhole
Ballerina Franceska Manheimer-Rosenberg, better known as Franceska Mann, was born in 1917 into a Jewish family in Poland. She exhibited a talent for dance from early on and studied it as she grew up. By her early twenties, she had become one of the most accomplished dancers in Poland and was a rising star in Europe’s dance scene. Then the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 derailed her promising career. She ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto and survived its liquidation by the Nazis in 1943.
Soon thereafter, however, she and thousands of other Jews who had managed to hide in Warsaw fell for a Nazi scheme designed to capture Jewish survivors. A ruse got them to buy neutral country passports on the black market, on the assumption that it would legally transform them into foreign citizens eligible to leave Nazi-occupied Europe. Franceska was among 2500 Jews who boarded trains that were supposed to take them to neutral Switzerland. Instead, they were taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp.
