Ode to Rachel Frankfoorder | Resilient, cheerful and vital

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Rachel van Amerongen-Frankfoorder is one of the few Amsterdam Jewish women who survived the concentration camps. She died in Israel at the age of 98. As a young woman, she lived in Amsterdam and worked at the Bijenkorf, our country's most beautiful and largest department store, run by Jews from its inception. There she became a colleague and friend of my mother.

Rachel met her first husband, Charlie Lu-A-Sie, whom she married in 1936. They had Désiré, a boy, call sign Dees, six months later.

Charlie, born in Suriname, joined the resistance, was betrayed and shot. Dees ended up at a safe house in Rotterdam, where he received a lot of beatings. Rachel was arrested with a false ID and ended up in Westerbork in the summer of 1944. She worked in the “inner office,” where she met both Anne Frank and her father. She didn't stay there long, because in the winter, like the Frank family, she went to Bergen Belsen and got number 88410 tattooed on her forearm.

On Feb. 7, Rachel was transported to women's camp Raghun, where she performed forced labor. On April 9, she continued eastward, to Theresienstadt concentration camp. On May 8, she was liberated by the Soviet army.

Immediately after the war, Rachel married Eddy van Amerongen, whom she had met in the camp.  Together they had another daughter, Mimi. In 1950, the family moved to Israel.

Actually, every Jewess who survived the concentration camps deserves an ode. But it is not only Rachel's strength (for me, Aunt Chel) that is so remarkable, but her optimism. She came back to Amsterdam for a few weeks every year at Christmas. She then sometimes stayed with my sister or other acquaintances in Amsterdam. We would hear the stories. Then I would see the tattoo on her arm and tell her that she stood in line three times: left can walk through, right to the “shower rooms. Each time she took something with her when she returned to her hometown, something small from Israel, from pieces of soap to a beautiful picture book that you had to read from right to left. I admired her cheerfulness, perseverance, resilience and lust for life.