Look and Listen

Biography

Rachel Van Meers was born in a home for unwed mothers in the city of Ghent Belgium, in 1930. Raised in the Flemish working-class by her strict grandmother, two aunts, and three uncles, Rachel recounts her struggles growing up a bastard in Belgium during the Great Depression. When the war broke out, Belgium was quickly taken over by Germany, and the people were left to fend for themselves against the overwhelming occupying forces and shattering Allied air strikes. Rachel's family remained loyal to Belgium, but her mother joined the SS. When a violent argument erupted between Rachel and her Nazi-sympathizing stepfather, she was sent to a child labor camp in Germany and later returned to witness Belgium in tatters after the war. Now a strong spirited young woman, she refused to go the way of her mother, or give in to the brutal attacks of her stepfather. She was eventually able to sustain her independence from her family and emigrate to America in 1961. Rachel has been a maid, a hat check girl, an electronics assembler, and an assistant apartment manager, in Belgium, Amsterdam, and the United States. Now retired, she lives in Oregon and is the matriarch of her family.

Inspiration

My neighbors and my family said, "Mom, you should tell your story." You know? I told them, "What is so special about it?" "Well," they said to me, "the way you talked about your parents, about the camp." I said, "Well, other people went through the same thing." But I was scared because I thought when I tell my story in a stupid book like that everybody's going to know my life. It was sad, really, when you really see what it was like. Sometimes I think, "What a lousy life." But, in the meantime I was blessed, too. Whatever I did, I was blessed by the Lord.