Franceska Mann

On October 23, 1943, a transport of around 1,700 Polish Jews arrived on passenger trains at the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, although they had been told that they were being taken to a transfer camp called Bergau near Dresden, from where they would continue on to Switzerland to be exchanged for German POWs. One of the passengers was Franceska Mann. She had probably obtained her foreign passport from the Hotel Polski on the Aryan side. In July 1943, the Germans arrested the 600 Jewish inhabitants of the hotel and some of them were sent to Bergen-Belsen as exchange Jews. Others were sent to Vittel in France to await transfer to South America.

According to Jan Grabowski, however, Mann was an infamous collaborator and szmalcownik, who turned in a Polish resistance member to the Germans and was shortly thereafter, in the autumn of 1942, executed by the Polish underground. The Auschwitz Museum confirms the account of women shooting the two SS guards on 23 October 1943. It’s believed it was Franciszka Mann but the identity of that women is not 100% verified.

Franceska Mann was a young dancer residing in Warsaw before the Second World War. She studied dance in the dance school of Irena Prusicka. Her friends at that time included Wiera Gran and Stefania Grodzieńska. In 1939 she was placed 4th during the international dance competition in Brussels among 125 other young ballet dancers. She was considered one of the most beautiful and promising dancers of her generation in Poland both in the classical and modern repertoire.

Franceska Manheimer-Rosenberg (4 February 1917 – 23 October 1943), better known as Franceska Mann, was a Polish ballerina who, according to some accounts, killed a Nazi guard, Josef Schillinger [de], while a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp and wounded at least one other, Wilhelm Emmerich [de]. Her actions are said to have sparked an uprising among fellow female Jewish prisoners before she herself was killed.