What would you do in the face of certain death? Would you accept your fate or fight until your fleeting breath? For Franceska Mann, or Franciszka Mannówna, a Polish-Jewish dancer on her way to the Auschwitz gas chamber, the answer was a no-brainer.
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Franceska Mann was a beautiful and exceptionally talented dancer, pirouetting her way through many prestigious shows and competitions, including the Brussels International Dance Competition of May 1939 where she won fourth prize. She danced regularly in Warsaw's Melody Palace nightclub before the outbreak of the Second World War and her career-shattering imprisonment in the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1943 she was transported out of Poland, presumably in connection with the Hotel Polski Affair, where Jews hoping to escape to South America with foreign passports were tricked and sent to Auschwitz instead.
According to some accounts, these 'exchange Jews' were told that they had in fact arrived at Bergau to be disinfected before crossing the border to Switzerland and led to the undressing room next to the gas chamber. There are many variations of the Franceska Mann story but perhaps the most sensational is told by Holocaust historian Cynthia Southern. While undressing, Mann purportedly tantalized two leering guards with a striptease, lifting her skirt to expose her thigh to Josef Schillinger and Wilhelm Emmerich and seductively moving aside her blouse.
She then swiftly removed her shoe to strike Schillinger in the forehead, before pulling the gun from his pocket and firing two fatal shots into his stomach and one into Emmerich's leg. The other women in the undressing room joined the revolt, although none of them were able to escape.
When the wide-eyed @xnulz asked Twitter to “Name a bitch badder than Taylor Swift” in November of 2017, it was no surprise that this version of the Franceska Mann chronicle, tweeted by @moviehistories, was among the most popular (over 35,000 RTs and counting) in a barrage of responses celebrating infinitely more impressive historical heroines. But how much of this account can be corroborated with cold, hard evidence? To get a clearer picture, I spoke to one of the world's leading Auschwitz experts: author, professor and historian Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt.