Fanny Ben-Ami was born in 1930 in Baden-Baden, Germany, to Hirsch and Yohanna-Hannah Eyal.
Her parents fled to Paris in 1933[1] and, after her father was arrested by the French secret police, she and her two sisters were sent by their mother to be sheltered by the charity O.S.E.
She was housed for nearly three years in a children's home in the Creuse region of Vichy France at the Château de Chaumont in the commune of La Serre-Bussière-Vieille.
At 13 and without accompanying adults, she led a group of Jewish children to neutral Switzerland, escaping from the Nazi persecution of the Holocaust.
In 2011 her memoir Le journal de Fanny was published in France, in which she recounts the escape.