A Life on the Run From the Nazis

On the morning of Aug. 26, 1942, as Françoise Frenkel neared her residential hotel in Nice, France, the 53-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee suddenly spotted one of her neighbors wildly waving at her from an upper window. At first she thought he was being comically friendly. She didn’t realize that he was saving her life, alerting her to the scene unfolding just around the corner, of gendarmes roughly grabbing men, women and children and shoving them onto transport buses. For weeks she had heard rumors that Nazi-occupied France had been ordered to proceed to the next step of the Reich-mandated destruction of the Jews, rounding them up for deportation to the grim fate of the concentration camps. Still, stunned by the commotion, Frenkel asked a passerby what was going on. His crisp reply: “We’re hunting humans now.”