Fran­ci Rabinek Epstein was born into a priv­i­leged fam­i­ly in Prague, Czecho­slo­va­kia in 1920 and edu­cat­ed at the Ecole Fran­caise, Lycee de Prague, and the Deutsches Staat­sre­al­gym­na­si­um before drop­ping out to appren­tice in her moth­er’s haute-cou­ture Salon. At 18, Fran­ci became the own­er of the Salon. In 1940 she mar­ried Joe Solar. She regard­ed the Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps as her uni­ver­si­ty. After lib­er­a­tion, she returned to Prague and mar­ried Kurt Epstein in 1946. In 1948, after the Com­mu­nist takeover of Czecho­slo­va­kia, she emi­grat­ed to New York City and estab­lished a new fash­ion salon on the Upper West Side. She lec­tured at uni­ver­si­ties on her expe­ri­ence dur­ing the war before dying of a brain aneurysm in 1989.